Frasi di Anthony Burgess

pagina 6

“L'arte è pericolosa. È una delle sue attrattive: quando cessa di essere pericolosa, tu non la vuoi.”

“Non si chiedono mica quale è la causa della bontà. e allora perché il contrario?”

“Ma il vero peccato sta nell’intenzione esistenziale. Un uomo che non può scegliere cessa di essere un uomo.”

“La guerra è il sistema più spiccio per trasmettere una cultura.”

“Se Arancia meccanica, così come 1984, rientra nel novero dei salutari moniti letterari – o cinematografici – contro l'indifferenza, la sensibilità morbosa e l'eccessiva fiducia nello Stato, allora quest'opera avrà qualche valore.”

“Il terrorismo viene presentato dai terroristi medesimi come uno strumento ad alta finalità, ma gli strumenti hanno la tendenza ad impinguarsi delle finalità fino a sostituirsi ad esse. Lo strumento rende la vita tollerabile al funzionario, laddove la finalità non si mostra bastevole o sufficiente. Solo anime innocenti possono essere capaci di deplorare la crudeltà di mezzi necessari alla instaurazione di finalità gloriose. Uno di questi era Michail Bakunin, santo patrono degli anarchici. Bakunin aveva studiato Hegel, che insegnava l'inevitabilità dell'avvento del millennio. L'Hegelismo applicato è riscontrabile tanto nel marxismo quanto nel bakuninismo, le due dottrine che, entrambe, insegnavano come il cammino dell'inevitabilità possa essere accelerato dall'azione dell'uomo. Azione chiamata rivoluzione nella sfera delle idee, terrorismo nella sfera della pratica”

“In realtà lui non ha scelta, vero? Era il proprio interesse, la paura del dolore fisico che lo hanno spinto a quel grottesco gesto di autoavvilimento. La sua insincerità era anche troppo evidente. Cessa di essere un malfattore, ma cessa anche di essere una creatura capace di scelta morale.”

“Era come un uccello del cielo celeste più raramente filato o come un vino argenteo che scorreva su un'astronave, la gravità ora non ha senso.”

“Con donne così squisite c'è poco bisogno di afrodisiaci….”

“Howarth began to see that, however much it was against one’s will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.”

“We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.
I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want -- the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when gods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted noblimente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflection but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive.”

“Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.”

“Paresis, as it is generally called in preference to the old GPI or general paralysis of the insane, is characterized by symptoms of bewildering variety, confirming the description of syphilis as the Great Imitator or, because of this very wealth of its ultimate manifestations, the Aristocrat of Diseases. Paresis involves a meningoencephalitis which marks its onset by personality changes, mild at first but growing steadily worse. There is irritability, failure of memory and judgement, insomnia, slovenliness, aggression, confusion, delusion, manic depression, epileptiform convulsion, slurred speech, incontinence, emaciation, sensational psychosis, finally death. The act of careless bohemian love, anonymous, quick and uncondomized, is proved not to have been worth the trouble or money…..”

“…even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.”

“We know what goes on in the act of love, and those of us who are writers despair of ever finding verbal equivalents for the pain and pleasure of excitation fulfilled in what Rabelais’s translator Urquhart called ‘venerean ecstasy’. A mechanical description of the act tells us nothing, any more than a scientifically accurate account of mastication will convey the flavour of roast duck.”

“Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.”

“…today’s…newspapers…full of…diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State…. He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment…”

“Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.”

“Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.”

“She sank again into the salty water…into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.”

“I had always had grave doubts about Eliot's taste and, indeed, intelligence. [T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 1980]”

“The Residents knew what they wanted of their Malayan Civil Service cadets as early as 1883: "What we require out here are young public school men - Cheltenham, for preference - who have failed conspicuously at all bookwork and examinations in proportion as they have excelled at sports." As Resident of Perak, Swettenham “kept an eye out for men who would do credit to both the civil service and the state cricket team, which one sporting official judged as the equal of a good English county team.” Oliver Marks, who performed brilliantly for a visiting Ceylon eleven, was at once urged to come and work for the Perak government….”

“Tertiary syphilis, as my readers will not need reminding perhaps, comes, when it comes at all, about ten years after the initial infection. About two thirds of syphilitics miss it, especially if they are women or coloured. It is believed, though without solid evidence, that it attacks the sedentary more than the active. This means that writers and composers, granted that primary lesion, are prone to it.”

“[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 sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”

“They’ll be in all our houses,’ I said, ‘blackies of all colours, before the century’s over. The new world belongs to Asia.”

“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”

“Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies, upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like…. The old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms — “wuf waf wof” — so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.”

“There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well.”

“The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy.”

“…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.”

“There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say.”

“Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.”

“Find a cosy table
Inside a restaurant,
Somewhere formidable
Where you’ll be très contents.
Let your lady fair know
That she is all you see,
Prime her with a Pernod
Or three.
Watch her crack a lobster
And strip it to the buff,
Rough as when a mobster
Gets tough.
Keep the wine cascading
And you’ll ensure
Une petite spécialité called l’amour….”

“As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.”

“Maugham was a mere visitor and did not have to take any language examinations; a civil servant like myself was forced to reach degree level in Malay….”

“Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.”

“With such exquisite women there is little need for aphrodisiacs….”

“…the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world….”