It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
Anthony BurgessIt was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
Anthony BurgessThere is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition
Anthony Burgess