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Quotes from A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English — Anthony Burgess

1917–1993 England

← All quotes by Anthony Burgess

9 quotes

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

An Egyptian priest....plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

‘Ass’ for ‘arse’ does not seem to represent a willingness, on British lines, to make the word arhotic; rather it is a puritanical substitution which forces a real ass to become a donkey or burro.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Pornography….the reader panting, eventually masturbating

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Anthony Burgess (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.