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.

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Life is, of course, terrible.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.