Anthony Burgess
Books and Quotes Collection
Time for a Tiger
1956Beds in the East
1959
The mere sensuous impact of trumpet or saxophone, whatever it happened to be playing, was an echo, even though a faint echo, of that excitement and abandon. He wanted to taste, smell, hear: his senses were terribly alive.
Sullenly they paid what was asked, sullenly left, Hamzah feigning a kick at the glass showcase filled with loaves and Chinese cakes.
Occasionally she gasped out "Joe!" — a flat animal cry that her slack vocal cords made unfemininely deep, that her nasopharynx, choked with mucus, robbed of all resonance.
"Oh, yes. He talks a lot about phonemes and semantemes and bilabial fricatives. He has a van with recording apparatus in it. He's a good chap."
"Tambi will be here in..." He computed carefully. "... in exactly twenty seconds." And, lo, Tambi appeared at that very moment.
A Clockwork Orange
1962
I gave them the ultra-violence, the crasting, the dratsing, the old in-out in-out, the lot, right up to this night's veshch with the bugatty starry ptitsa with the mewing kots and koshkas.
I was slooshying more like malenky romantic songs, what they call Lieder, just a goloss and a piano, very quiet and like yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between […]
This evening in the Korova there was a fair number of vecks and ptitsas and devotchkas and malchicks smecking and peeting away, and cutting through their govoreeting and the burbling of the in-the-landers with their 'Gorgor fallatuke and the worm sprays in filltip slaughterballs' and all that cal you could slooshy a popdisc on the stereo, this being Ned Achimota singing 'That Day, Yeah, That Day'.
Our starry droog Kubrick the sinny veck has, my brothers, like brought forth from his like bounty and all that cal this kniggiwig, which is like all real horrorshow lomticks from his Great Masterpiece which would make any fine upstanding young malchick smeck from his yarbles and keeshkas.
There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all together, but there were four of us malchicks and it was usually like one for all and all for one.
Nothing Like the Sun
1964M/F
1971
It had been used for clownish mock-disappearences, one auguste looking for another through endlessly circling blackness, an apparatus not now much in use.
The men in her life were all swine before whom she'd cast the margaric treasures of her mind and body.
It was a long one, ranging from (but I may have misremembered) antipedobaptism to the illegal importation of zumbooruks.
Aderyn the Bird Queen sat down; her pygostyle engaged a hard wooden bottom.
[…] [Aderyn the Bird Queen], on whose face a kind of agitated oil or sweat was spreading thinly, an uropygial secretion.
What do you call that animal that goes backward and forward, head at each end? —'Amphisbaena'. A kind of lizard. It doesn't exist.
This morning Lupo Sassone, the garbage collector and oddjob-man who lives next door, climbed out on to the parapet to make more acute the angle of the jut of the cicogna while the tramontana tore at him.
Earthly Powers
1980
"Still, he looks very distinguished and venerable in his robes." "Oh Christ, is he an autocephalic archbishop?"
It was the left eye that had gone. She wore over the hollow a pad that matched her suit and also a melleous wig with a tress flowing down to her cheek.
‘This,’ the colonel said […] ‘is a lampshade. It looks like an ordinary lampshade. It was taken from the bedside lamp of Frau Koch. It’s genuine human skin.’ It sounded more gruesome spoken in his diphthongal southern manner—skee-ern.
Nicholas agreed but, to bring the proceedings to an end and enable him to perform his salvatory mission, he swung into a cabaletta which summed up the argument against Anus and then, fired, struck the heresiarch a knockdown blow.
[…] Tom’s cough was revealed as clearly unvolitional […]
Stertile thunder tonitruated terribly. ‘Oh Lord forgive us our bloody sins.’ Rain now pelted. It was hard work finding a taxi.
The bellydancer oozed towards our table, her cuplike navel apout.
Soon the Germans would see me on their screens and hear me barking. There was also plenty of work for me in Hollywood. The Food of the Gods was never to achieve filmhood, nor was the projected musical on Shakespeare's life called Will!
Christ appeared, only to reveal himself as the naked god Pan. Ballet of hetaerae and houris, choreography by Italo Castaldi.
The audience was made up almost entirely of international youth, bearded and jeaned and unwashed.
Enderby's Dark Lady
1984
She advertised the lipoid virtues of what he had heard called junkfood, presumably food for junkies, whom, living in Tangiers, he knew all about.
[…] he gloomily regarded his new digital watch, faintly fascinated by the onward march of the square figures which turned one into the other with insolent ease, a kind of numerical paronomasia.
Una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure.
He seeks to work in the arena? […] His is a manly trade; sybaritic Rome, that is becoming effeminate, needs to see muscle at work, recalling more primitive glories.
There are four flutes, a harp of twenty strings, a mournful shawm, and a number of drums of oxhide, some to be struck, others spanked.
This is a feeble article of faith to begin with, but it helps to push my pen through this exordium and what now follows.