Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Burgess

Afternoon is when the day’s respectable fiction starts to sag. Burgess’s line turns the unconscious into a mildly unruly coworker: it lets you run the morning on discipline, caffeine, and intention, then clocks in later to derail the schedule with a dream, a compulsion, a stray memory that suddenly feels like fate. The joke is in the phrasing - “has a habit” makes the psyche sound banal, domesticated, like nail-biting or tea at four, even as it describes something that can upend a life. Burgess is smuggling menace inside a sitcom cadence.

The specific intent feels double-edged. On one level, it’s craft advice disguised as aphorism: writers know that the afternoon slump is also a loosened grip on self-control, when associations start roaming and sentences get weird in the productive way. Burgess, who wrote with ferocious speed and treated language like an instrument to be played, recognizes that fatigue can be an aperture. On another level, the line nods to the psychoanalytic 20th century he lived through, when “the unconscious” became a cultural character - a force you could blame, consult, even fear.

Subtext: the rational self is a morning performance. By mid-afternoon, the body’s dip in vigilance invites what you’ve been editing out - desire, dread, aggression, grief - to “assert itself,” a phrase borrowed from politics and social conflict. Burgess frames inner life as a power struggle, not a harmony, and the setting is pointedly ordinary: not in dreams at night, but right there between lunch and quitting time, when you’re supposed to be functional. That’s why it lands. It locates the uncanny inside the daily calendar.