Quotes
Quotes about Time
The best-selling formula for our times insists on the combination of frank sex and technical information. The reader enjoys the sex, and, if he feels any shame in this, it can dissolve in a sense of virtue that he is learning how an airport is run, or a bank, or the White House, or a nuclear installation.
...America was a new country and it seemed queer that they'd got all these slums there already in that short space of time
The short story has always existed. The stories we tell to children at bedtime are short stories
Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temparament with which you have endowed them
It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul; there must be a body as well, an an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in
It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul; there must be a body as well, and an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in
I can write two novels at a time - one in the morning, one in the afternoon
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
Anthony Burgess A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
The flow of time means nothing in itself, and yet, in ordinary life, we are forced to travel along it
Only the amateur - carpenter or novelist - has all the time in the world; the professional sometimes has to hurry
When I first began to write fiction it was ... refined hobby that, as I got deeper into it, began to demand more time and application than was right for a hobby: it began to wish to be a full-time job
There are two good reasons for writing much, if one can. The first is the need to earn; the second is the fear of an untimely death, which will prevent the half-formed books in one's mind from being realized. We know not the day nor the hour. I may be killed in a train accident when taking this present book to my publisher in London. You can see whether or not this happened by reading the blurb on the dust jacket
War becomes time, and time logic on buried premises
Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing, swallows up process and end in no argument, brings new picture of old time.
Useless to hope to hold off the unavoidable happening with that frail barricade of week, day or hour which melts as it is made, for time himself will bring you in his high-powered car, rushing to it, whether you will or not
Time, as we know, must in time get the better of time, so time came for slurred and claudicant me
There are times ... when drunkeness attacks the universe of the spirit. The balance of good and evil is very noticably distrubed, and while some fear the end of all things, others rejoice in the belief that a new age is coming
Many a man ... has known preferment through timely verses
Life is so, often grossly so, so that a playmaker feels himself to be a better contriver than God or Fate or who runs the mad world. The madness is in the brevity of time
It is time to rise all above the body and live in a making soul
To emboss a stamp of order on time's flux is an impossibility I must make possible through my art, such as it is
The foul wrong then lay beyond a man's own purposing; there was somewhere, outside time's very beginning, an infinite well of putridity from which body and mind alike were driven, by some force unseen and uncontrollable, to drink
