Anthony Burgess Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Book, Violence

• A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Book, Boys

• Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Looks, Fiction

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

• The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Reading, Book, Substitutes

  New York Times Book Review 4 Dec. 1966, p. 74

• It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Writing, Personality

• Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Reading, Average

• The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Adults, Relation

• Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Ignorance, Stupidity

• Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Behinds, Has Beens

  Anthony Burgess, Earl G. Ingersoll, Mary C. Ingersoll (2008). “Conversations with Anthony Burgess”, p.46, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Writing, Men

  Anthony Burgess, Earl G. Ingersoll, Mary C. Ingersoll (2008). “Conversations with Anthony Burgess”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Catholic, Musician

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