Life’s only choosing when to die. Life’s a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It’s a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
People don’t want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.
You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care.
You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.
Well, everything’s a lesson, isn’t it? Learning all the time, as you could say.
The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.
And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.
The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.
When we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.
And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.
What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.
The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy – is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?
In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.
What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.
It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
The heresy of an age of reason,’ or some such slovos [words]. ‘I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
You’re a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality’s always dull, you know, but when we see that it’s all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.
There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language
There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.
You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.
Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.
I can’t accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.
It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.
We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
…I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless…
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.
That’s the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.
Of course it was horrible,’ smiled Dr. Branom. ‘Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it.
Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.
And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. —– “A Clockwork Orange Resucked” intro to first full American version 1986
Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.
Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Without class differences England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.