Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

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.

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.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed...

We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being...

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.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?’ And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: ‘Am...

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

Oh? And what’s so stinking about it?.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

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.

What’s all this about sin, eh?”That,’ I said, very sick. ‘Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.’ And then I was really sick and they had to...

The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded.

I was cured all right.

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

When we pray we admit defeat.

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the...

Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self...

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

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...

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found...

Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

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.

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition...

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

Then I wanted to sick up the gluey pie I’d had before the start of the evening, But I couldn’t stand the sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor, so I held it back.

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.

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...

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

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...

As for the new world war that’s waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We’ve already played at this war...

I was always on my oddy knocky.

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not...

Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Look, I don’t see why bad artists – I mean artists who are obviously incompetent… – why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they’re supposed to be advancing the frontiers of...

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

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.