Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess turns what sounds like a small domestic pleasure into a sly manifesto: age, he suggests, doesn’t just lose things, it gains a specific luxury youth can’t properly imagine - the pleasure of refusal. “Not Going” isn’t laziness; it’s agency. Capitalized, it reads like a formal appointment with yourself, a deliberate opting out of the social churn that youth treats as compulsory.

The line works because it reverses the usual sentimental script about aging. We’re trained to see later life as a narrowing. Burgess frames it as an expansion of internal sovereignty: the older you get, the less you need the theater of being seen. Youth is “beyond” this delight not because young people lack discipline, but because their identities are still being forged in public. They go because going is how you test yourself, collect stories, prove membership. To not go, early on, risks invisibility or missing the plot.

Burgess’s subtext is also cultural and classed: the modern world fetishizes busyness as virtue, attendance as moral hygiene. “Not Going” punctures that ethic with a wry, almost mischievous permission slip. Coming from a novelist who understood both performance and solitude, it doubles as a defense of the private life - the quiet room where taste consolidates, judgments sharpen, and obligations finally get renegotiated.

It’s not an anti-social sneer so much as a hard-won palate shift: the point isn’t that events are bad; it’s that your time stops being cheap.