"A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine.  Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived."

"Only the vicious or stupid can accord total loyalty to a party."

"Revolutions are usually the work of disgruntled intellectuals with the gift of gab.  They go to the barricades in the name of the peasant or the working man."

"Exalt the collective and diminish the individuals, and history will be a procession of human triumphs."

"Art does not elevate us into beneficence."

"We can't be kind to the poor when the State kills the very concept of poverty.  Industries nationalized, and the workers become civil servants, unfireable, hence not giving a damn.  Without tooth and claw, no urge to work."

"The student leaders reported in the press are ranting extremists of an eclectic kind, mixing Marx and Bakunin, Zen and the Hobbits in bouts of verbalization with no real programme except more and more license of the young."

"What I have in particular is a kind of residual Christianity that oscillates between Augustine and Pelagius."

"Liberalism breeds disappointment...Accept that man is imperfect, that good and evil exist, and you will not, like Wells, expect too much from him."

"But the Kafka world is hopeless, and Christianity is based on hope, as well as faith and charity."

"The obsession with time which we find in Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf alike is not a yielding to it; it is an attempt to conquer it."

"Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing."

"A novel is primarily an entertainment that should primarily entertain its author."

"Human sexuality...has few international variations.  It is the true universal speech."

"I had been unwavering in my lack of faith in statesmen, and it worried me that certain writers I admired had expressed strong socialist views, which argued an unseemly naivete in dedicated followers of truth, since a political party can represent only a fraction of the human reality which government is meant to serve."

All of the above transcriptions belong to Anthony Burgess.