"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 cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self."

"If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others."

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

"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 of liberty means all. 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-."

"Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?"

"You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God."

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

"John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced."

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

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

"What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more."

"I was always on my oddy knocky."

"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare."

"Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000."

"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 a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible."

"We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation."

"The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?"

"The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet."

"Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say."

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

"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."

"That's the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law."

"Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil."

"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."

"When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea."

"An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust."

"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 moral choice."

"Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace."

"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."

"Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through."

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

"But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective."

"It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

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

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

"A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual."

"What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

"Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever."

"Of course it was horrible,' smiled Dr. Branom. 'Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it."

"Without class differences England would cease to be the living theatre it is."

"A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life."

"You're a romantic, said Crabbe. '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."

"The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment."

"The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it."

"So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing."

"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 which, I take it, we call a system of morality."

"Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But 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 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."

"Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred."

"Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed."

"Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude."