Anthony Burgess Quotes

I don't look at myself as a historical icon, but the reality of it is, yeah, I am playing for history now.

I want to affect culture. I want to have my mark on everything. I give examples of people like Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones - those are the people who I look up to. The game wouldn't be the same without them. What happens in the course of 5 years isn't really important to me. I care about what they'll say about me in 50 years.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

I would like to live forever in people's hearts and minds; that would be fun. I'll leave the world my art.

Once you have a certain amount of money, it ceases to be an issue. I'd rather put my cultural imprint on the fabric of life. After money, all you want is immortality.

I certainly hope 'Dragon' can leave some legacy behind.

I want to create a body of work that is entertaining and speaks to people for a long time. Longer than my life span.

Napolean is dead - but Beethoven lives.

I am aware of the words 'national treasure' being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old.

It is very difficult to capture over the centuries, the charisma of an individual.

… the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry.

If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.

Michael Jackson doesn't really belong on this planet. He's the most important figure in the history of music. He'll be remembered far longer than George Bush will. 200 years from now, people will be talking about Michael Jackson, and no one's going to mention George Bush.

I can't picture people talking about me 50 years from now.

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.

Like all artists, I want to cheat death a little and contribute something to the next generation.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.