Writer’s Crush: Anthony Burgess

” It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” From A Clockwork Orange

“So now it was to be Georgie the General, saying what we should do and what not to do, with Dim as his mindless grinning bulldog. But then I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and the oomny ones use, like, inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid, there was a window open with the stereo on and I viddied right at once what to do.” From A Clockwork Orange

“We’d not done any Shakespeare at the secondary mod, because the teachers said we wouldn’t like it and we’d get bored. They never gave us the chance to see whether we’d get bored or not.” From One Hand Clapping

 “If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There’s a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you’re dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they’re the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.”

“To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.”

As a critic, novelist, and screenwriter, Burgess wrote in a style that uses an unusually large vocabulary and plays with the use of language as a style device.

In A Clockwork Orange, for instance, Burgess uses a made-up language that is a cross between the British Cockney dialect and Russian. His use and level of language are often designed to reflect the theme: in his novel One Hand Clapping, he restricted himself to a vocabulary of around 800 words, reinforcing his theme that western popular culture is hurting civilization.