Anthony Burgess, biographies

"...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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"[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 is like a definition of hell."

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

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

"...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."

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

"...he was berserk."

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

"Who does he think he is?"

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

"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."

"...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..."

"...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."

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

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

"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...."