Anthony Burgess

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child. ”

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel. ”

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in. ”

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation. ”

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace. ”

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going. ”

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through. ”

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such. ”

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel. ”

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. ”