Anthony Burgess citáty

page 8

„Nikdy som nemal peniaze, preto nemám žiadne sympatie pre kapitalistov.“

„Cesnak je najkrajšia vôňa na svete -veľmi, veľmi erotická u ženy.“

„Smej sa a svet sa bude s tebou smiať. Chráp a budeš sám spať.“

„Smrť prichádza ako účet za plyn, ktorý nemôžete zaplatiť.“

„Viem, čo je láska. Láska je muž a žena v posteli.“

„Všetci muži snívajú o tlstých ženách, nikdy nie o chudých ženách.“

„Život je mizerná, sivá sobota; ale musí sa prežiť.“

„Vidím, čo je správne a schvaľujem to, ale stále robím to, čo je zlé.“

„Každé zrnko skúsenosti je potravou pre chamtivú rastúcu dušu umelca.“

“I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.”

“The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.”

“All right,” said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.”

“The greater part of the time I spent, when I talked at all, talking to men. I liked to take luncheon in some pub or other, sitting on a high stool at the snack-counter, barons of beef, hams, salads and dishes of pickle spread before me, the server in his tall white cap carving with skill. Other male eaters would be wedged against me, champing over newspapers, and there were a peculiar animal content in being among warm silent men, raising glasses in smacking silent toasts to themselves, the automatic ‘ah’ after the draught, the forkful of red beef and mustard pickle. Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.”

“We're in control, and we have what we want!”

“…I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.”

“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

“…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose”

“In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply.”

“I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.”

“The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.”

“…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.”

“I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"…”

“You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.”

“Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him….”

“Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.”

“(Singapore) is not even a place where a white man is permitted to go to pieces….”

“Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.”

“The British…used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language…was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girls’-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate feebly to the enemy.”

“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”

“There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection….”

“The consciousness in [Australia and New Zealand] of the elevation of a substandard dialect into a national tongue has been responsible for a mixture of attitudes to citizens of the mother country - inferiority, defiance, contempt. A blending of the first two may be responsible for the upward intonation pattern of answers, more appropriate to questions…. slang is of its nature defiant. It is also demotic…. But the ruling class of Australia is itself demotic.”

“They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsnioke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya.”

“The most sensational of all the sick literary lives was that of Maupassant, who died mad at forty-three and whose hatred of God, man and nature - manifested in literary productions which give us immense pleasure: how is that to be explained? - spring from a kind of mother fixation as well as a terror of the cold. He was a bull of a man much given to boats and riparian dalliance, but he had bad circulation. He had other things too, including a Chinese-style priapism which enabled him to copulate, usually in public, six times in a row, the secret being his failure to detumesce. This, of course, like acne and the common cold, can be a symptom of tertiary syphilis, which Maupassant certainly had.”

“‘That it is still possible for a man of initiative to make money in the East is the firm opinion of balding, plump Mr Denham who adds, however, “Not if you take a wife with you.” Mr Denham has scathing things to say about Englishwomen and their lack of domestic virtues. He particularly selects their cooking as a target, but considers also that they are far inferior to the slant-eyed beauties of the Orient in the all-important matter of fidelity to their menfolk. Mr Denham is considered an authority on the women of Japan who, he says, are lovely, demure and submissive…. On his own admission he has little time for anything except money, dalliance, and the “imbibing of liquors of all kinds”.’”

“There was a silence. Outside, and most unfortunately, a boy could be heard calling to another boy: ‘Piss off, Cowie.’ Stern looks were fixed on Woolton.”

“…the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.”

“Ted, I noted, was very busy - at the pumps, at the glasses behind, the bottles below, the merrily ringing till, like a percussion-player in some modern work who dashes with confidence from xylophone to glockenspiel to triangle to wind-machine to big drum to tambourine.”

“There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.”