Frases de Anthony Burgess

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“Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible.”

“Quizás el hombre que elige el mal es en cierto modo mejor que aquel a quien se le impone el bien”

“El hombre que no puede elegir ha perdido la condición humana.”

“Pero hermanos, este morderse las uñas acerca de la causa de la maldad es lo que me da verdadera risa. No les preocupa saber cuál es la causa de la bondad, y entonces, ¿por qué quieren averiguar el otro asunto? Si los liudos (individuos) son buenos es porque les gusta, y ni se me ocurriría interferir en sus placeres, así que lo mismo deberían hacer en el otro negocio. Y yo soy cliente del otro negocio.”

“Hay pecado supongo, pero el castigo fue del todo desproporcionado. Te han convertido en algo que ya no es una criatura humana. Ya no estás en condiciones de elegir. Estás obligado a tener una conducta que la sociedad considera aceptable, y eres una máquina que sólo puede hacer bien".”

“Algunas veces no es grato ser bueno, pequeño 6655321. Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible. Y te lo digo sabiendo que quizá te parezca una afirmación muy contradictoria. Sé que esto me costará muchas noches de insomnio. ¿Qué quiere Dios? ¿El bien o que uno elija el camino del bien? Quizás el hombre que elige el mal es en cierto modo mejor que aquel a quien se le impone el bien. Son problemas profundos y difíciles, pequeño 6655321.”

“Él ordeñaría al hombre blanco ... El hombre blanco tenía más dinero que sentido.”

“(Singapur) no es ni siquiera un lugar donde a un hombre blanco se le permite desmoronarse...”

“¿Es mejor para un hombre haber elegido el mal que tener el bien impuesto sobre él?”

“Bueno, que me cuelguen si no es ese gordo maloliente, el cabrón Billy y toda la porquería. ¿Cómo estás, botellón de aceite de cocina barato? Acércate, que te daré una en los yarblocos, si es que los tienes, eunuco grasiento.”

“Las cosas serán siempre peores, nunca mejores.
Qué nuevo mundo están preparándose ustedes.”

“Es tan inhumano ser totalmente bueno como totalmente malvado. Lo importante es la elección moral.”

“El enfoque científico de la vida no es necesariamente apropiado para los estados de angustia visceral.”

“... ¿Solo ustedes malditos hipócritas con sus cuatro esposas y sus diez mil horas en el cielo? ...”

“Bien alimentado y licuado, respondí con ardor.”

“Los escritores no son, por naturaleza, respetables: su función es ser subversivos.”

“¿Qué va a pasar entonces, eh?”

“Me curé bien.”

“... Tu pequeño feuilleton ... grabando ... el crudo filisteísmo de mi nabob ...”

“excita el páncreas a nuevos esfuerzos”

“La iglesia sostiene que puede ser maltratada, pero los puños que la maltratan conocen su propia impotencia.”

“Las lenguas nunca se detienen. La ortografía moderna cristaliza las pronunciaciones perdidas: lo visual nunca alcanza a lo auditivo.”

“… Prefiero pensar en las [mujeres jóvenes] menos como seres humanos que como parcelas llenas de reflejos televisivos.”

“Mientras caminaba hacia el viaje, esa ilusión de liberación, extrañamente me sentí caminando de regreso a la infancia.”

“Todo fuera Quiero verte en tu horrible desnudez sucia, peluda y barrigada.”

“A heavy task, but there was light relief
In the Germanic ambience, boisterous, brash,
Torchlit parades and pogroms, guttural grief
In emigration queues, the smash and crash
Of pawnshop windows by insentient beef
In uniform, the gush of beer, the splash
Of schnapps, the joy of being drunk and Aryan,
Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Human pain meant
But little in the Gulf War's visual grammar, a
Big feast of death to feed the cinecamera”

“I remember an old proverb. It says that youth thinks itself wise just as drunk men think themselves sober. Youth is not wise! Youth knows nothing about life! Youth knows nothing about anything except for massive cliches which for the most part through the media of pop songs are just foisted on them by middle-age entrepreneurs and exploiters who should know better. When we start thinking that pop music is close to God, then we'll think pop music is aesthetically better than it is. And it's only the aesthetic value of pop music that we're really concerned. I mean the only way we can judge Wagner or Beethoven or any other composer is aesthetically. We don't regard Wagner or Beethoven nor Shakespeare or Milton as great teachers. When we start claiming for Lennon or McCartney or Maharishi or any other of these pop prophets the ability to transport us to a region where God becomes manifest then I see red. We're satisfied with our little long playing record, ten pop numbers or thereabouts a side. This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told: "You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it." When you're told these things you sit down with a sigh of relief: "Thank God I don't have to learn, I don't have to travel, I don't have to exert myself in the slightest. I am what I am. Youth is youth. Pop is pop. There's no need to progress. There's no need to do anything. Let us sit down, smoke our marijuana (an admirable thing in itself but not the end of anything), let us listen to our records and life has become a single moment. And the single moment is eternity. We're with God. Finis!”

“I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.”

“There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving…. I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted…. For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son…. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.”

“…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.”

“Chickaks or geckos chirp on the walls….”

“It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.”

“Ah, well, if they wanted their adultery, what did it matter to me? I hadn’t much room to talk, anyway, with my five-pound prostitutes who did a bunk and the Japanese girls who cost far less and didn’t do a bunk and whatever I was likely to pick up in Colombo.”

“We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men called the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.”

“The London office of the International Council for University Development was in Queen Street. Edwin hesitated outside, adjusting his cap, tightening the knot of his tie, smoothing his pyjama collar. The portals, a naked sculptural group above them emblematic of the Tutorial System, were designed to intimidate. The doors were all glass and hence appeared to be ever-open; this again must be emblematic of something.”

“[Graham Greene’s] ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience.”

“The Antipods…were always ready to burst.”

“Oh, love, love, love —
Love on a hilltop high,
Love against a cloudless sky,
Love where the scene is
Painted by a million stars,
Love with martinis
In the cabarets and bars.
Oh, love, love, love…”

“When we arrived at New York I went, straight after clearing customs, to the Algonquin Hotel. I would not claim as of right a room in my own flat, since Hortense must now regard it as hers. After a couple of whisky sours in the Blue Bar I walked up Fifth Avenue. The September heat was intense and the air was all woollen shirts aboil. The town was full of jumbo steaks and ice cream, the shops pleaded that we buy useless gadgets. This was not Europe. This was very far from being Europe. Victory in Europe and Asia confirmed the excellence of the American way of life. Strong appetite and inviolable health. The afternoon sun was higher here than in any town of Europe, forced upwards by the skyscrapers. The place was rife with life.”

“The truth about the world about us.' 'Truth' is a word used in many different ways - 'You’re not telling the truth.' 'The truth about conditions in Russia.' 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' I want to use it here in the sense of what lies behind and outward show. I. et me hasten to explain by giving an example. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That is what we see; that is the ‘outward show'. In the past the outward show was regarded as the truth. But then a scientist came along to question it and then to announce that the truth was quite different from the appearance: the truth was that the earth revolved and the sun remained still -the outward show was telling a lie. The curious thing about scientific truths like this is that they often seem so useless. It makes no difference to the average man whether the sun moves or the earth moves. He still has to rise at dawn and stop work at dusk. But because a thing is useless it does not mean that it is valueless. Scientists still think it worthwhile to pursue truth. They do not expect that laws of gravitation and relativity are going to make much difference to everyday life, but they think it is a valuable activity to ask their eternal questions about the universe. And so we say that truth - the thing they are looking for—is a value.”

“I watched the grey villages limp by, the wind tearing at torn posters of long-done events. What I needed, of course, was a drink.”

“It's sapiens to be homo.”

“Prison religion'…”

“A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. ”

“Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely. ”

“In Lady Chatterley’s Lover we meet the ancient honest word fuck.”

“The most sensational of all the sick literary lives was that of Maupassant, who died mad at forty-three and whose hatred of God, man and nature - manifested in literary productions which give us immense pleasure: how is that to be explained?”

“The disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst…. The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheiks came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat….”

“This damnable sex, boys - ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at the very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God’s holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“East? They wouldn’t know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East. That’s where the East is, there.”

“See also: Anthony Burgess, biographies.”