"You're a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull."
- Anthony Burgess
"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..."
"They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed..."
"There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly."
"You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to..."
"A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey."
"Oh? And what's so stinking about it?."
"Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language"
"There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it."
"You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God."