Autobiographies

"Christianity has the ring, the feel of unique truth. Of essential truth. By it, life is made full instead of empty, meaningful instead of meaningless."

"When she was launched, Davy christened her, breaking a bottle of wine against the lovely-curving bow, and crying as the schooner slipped into the water: "Keep us out of the set ways of life!""

"[Her death] saved our love from perishing in one of the other ways that love could perish. Would I not rather our love go through death than hate?"

"If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it — and the other one must find it. Every single thing that either of us likes. That way we shall create a thousand strands, great and small, that will link us together. Then we shall be so close that it would be impossible — unthinkable — for either of us to suppose that we could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. And our trust in each other will not only be based on love and loyalty but on the fact of a thousand sharings — a thousand strands twisted into something unbreakable."

"We met angrily in the dead of winter."

"Lewis had been his mainstay in this half-year of sounding the depths of his grief. It was he who had said that Davy's death was a severe mercy. A severe mercy — the phrase haunted him: a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love. For it had been death in love, not death of love. Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death; and if all natural love must die one way or another, Davy's death — he and she in love — was the death that hinted at springtime and rebirth. Sitting there on the rough wood of the bridge, he remembered his absolute knowing — something beyond faith or belief — in the moments after her death, in that suddenly empty room, that she still was. She had not ceased with that last light breath. She and he would meet again."

"I know people for whom music is just background noise. They don’t listen to it. They just consume it. These people have never made a mix-tape for anyone. These people are not my friends. These people have no soul."

"I'd shut the whole world down just to tell you."

"There are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one."

"It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying."

"When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other."

"Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape."

"But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape."

"The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life."

"When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free."

"Unlike me, Renee was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did.""

"I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language."

"Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten."

"It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you."

"On this occasion the Hospital Assistant had a marvellous escape. Hearing a noise outside, he opened the door of his tent and was horrified to see a great lion standing a few yards away looking at him. The beast made a spring towards him, which gave the Assistant such a fright that he jumped backwards, and in doing so luckily upset a box containing medical stores. This crashed down with such a loud clatter of breaking glass that the lion was startled for the moment and made off to another part of the enclosure. Here, unfortunately, he was more successful, as he jumped on to and broke through a tent in which eight patients were lying. Two of them were badly wounded by his spring, while a third poor wretch was seized and dragged off bodily through the thorn fence."

"Mabruki, of course, knew nothing, but volunteered the helpful and cheering information that we were lost and would all be killed by lions."

"...the camps of the workmen had also been surrounded by thorn fences; nevertheless the lions managed to jump over or to break through some one or other of these, and regularly every few nights a man was carried off, the reports of the disappearance of this or that workman coming in to me with painful frequency."

"Shortly after we started one of the Wa Kamba went down to the river's edge to fill his calabash with water, when a crocodile suddenly rose up out of the stream, seized the poor fellow and in a moment had dragged him in. I was on ahead at the time and so did not witness the occurrence, but on hearing the cries of the others I ran back as quickly as possible -- too late, however, to see any sign of either crocodile or native. Mahina philosophically remarked that after all it was only a washenzi (savage), whose loss did not much matter; and the other three Wa Kamba certainly did not appear to be affected by the incident, but calmly possessed themselves of their dead companion's bow and quiver of poisoned arrows, and of the stock of meat which he had left on the bank."

"Kingsley Amis and John Braine had been very much men of the left, but now they were swinging towards a reactionary stance that denied artistic progressivism as well as political."

"This was the order of a typical Burgess day in Etchingham in the 1960s. He would get up between seven and eight in the morning – 'grudgingly', he said – and bring himself to full wakefulness by blasting out William Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture or the Crown Imperial March on the record-player downstairs. Then he would kick his dog, a border collie named Hajji....Breakfast would be followed by...jokes and conversation with Lynne. She would open the morning’s post while he went through the newspapers (the Times and the Daily Mirror). Around ten o’clock he would go upstairs to his study, a large room with a south-facing window, looking out on to a long garden where caged guinea-pigs chewed the grass to save the trouble of having to mow it. He would settle down at the typewriter with a pint-mug of strong tea – ‘stepmother’s tea’ is what F.X. Enderby calls it – made with 'no fewer than five Twinings Irish Breakfast tea-bags'. He would remain at his desk for at least eight hours every day, weekends included, smoking excessively (his regular intake was eighty cigarettes per day) and rising occasionally – because he suffered from haemorrhoids, which he called the Writer’s Evil – to pace around the study....When his concentration failed, he would take three Dexedrine tablets, washing them down with a pint of iced gin-and-tonic before returning to the typewriter. Piles of books for review...covered the floor of his study and overflowed...onto the landing and down the stairs. (He reviewed more than 350 novels in just over two years for the Yorkshire Post, and there were always other freelance writing jobs on the go....) Apart from the work, of which there was obviously a great deal, there was also the drinking to get done. Burgess and Lynne would get through a couple of bottles of wine over dinner, and a dozen bottles of Gordon's gin were delivered to the house every week...."

"...harmless tendency to misremember the events of his own past for comic or dramatic effect."

"[Burgess] engaged in a good deal of public and private fantasising...laying down an alarming number of false trails."

"...a prince of the powers of the air; a mountain range full of ravines and waterfalls, torrents, crags and snowfields, casting a shadow for leagues over the plains...[even if his] house of fiction, for all its flights of stairs, antechambers, labyrinthine libraries, annexes, sliding panels, trapdoors, secret rooms, chambers of horrors and ornate carvings, is a bit gimcrack."

"...he is a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues are so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence. He was a Doctor Johnson of our fin de siècle..."

"I wallowed in Burgess's fecundity and catholicity....I adored his spectacle and noise, his flamboyance, the surface pleasures of his prose....he was irresistible."

"I continue to feel close to him....His dedication and intelligence can't be denied..."

"Who does he think he is?"

"He knew you weren't his equal, and I find this an insult."

"His success came from impressing people who didn't quite know better; he was left alone by those who did. He fell into that gap, and made a fortune for himself."

"...he was berserk."

"If he'd had a daughter, would he have pounced on her? An impossible speculation – who can say?"

"...gaunt, wan features ... waxy and pallid, long deprived of the sun. And how are we going to describe his hair? The yellowish-white powdery strands were coiled on his scalp like Bram Stoker's Dracula ... What does it say about a man that he could go around like that ... king of the comb-over (did the clumps and fronds emanate from his ear-hole?) ... however the nicotine-stained fuzzy bush at the summit of frame served to distract from the ugliness of the rest of his face ... unnaturally long lower teeth, the colour of maize, and no upper set to speak of, the top of his mouth or lip having become elongated to conceal his gums, like a baboon."

"....Though he wanted us to believe his sexual energies were unstoppable, actually he was impotent."

"He wrote to keep back his thoughts, and not (particularly) to articulate them."

"...Burgess is like a definition of hell."

"[on Burgess's first wife Lynne] Who, in actuality, would want to align themselves with her ruinous boozing? Once you'd seen her project a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, six feet across a room, you'd seen everything. It's so sad, the decline from a sheltered and provincial childhood to a non-life as an afternoon-club drunk and good-time girl. She returned to her husband because there really was nobody else....she couldn't cope with adulthood - with its disappointments, curtailments, longings and dissolvings. Hence, the drinking trough, the recourse of those who fear a clear consciousness, who are disinclined to see things in their true colours."

"Burgess was not a generous man, financially, spiritually or morally..."

"I think Burgess hated being a human being, and he was only to be happy inside his head."

"His conversation was a monologue, delivered in his exhibitionistic Victorian actor-manager voice."

"He was a whole world to me once when I was young and what I published was academic in inspiration ... It worries me that henceforward he is going to have a spurious reputation ... pumped up by second-rate scholar-squirrels from unheard-of institutions."

"...great writer who never wrote a great book - but perfected a great writer act."

"...what is this persistent fantasy that he is a great leg-over man?....he has had carnal knowledge of Chinese, Malay, Buginese, Tamil, Singhalese, Bengali, Japanese and Algonquin women - all prostitutes....Or perhaps it was the same prostitute - there's a lot of racial overlap in the Federated Malay States....his sexual antics are fiction."

"...a parody of a great writer, rather than a great writer."

"Being Burgess was...a bogus business."

"He never got the hang of young people and would bridle and bristle at long hair and pop music like a beef-faced retired colonel in Angmering-on-Sea."