Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess, forever shadowed by A Clockwork Orange, has a nasty knack for turning moral panic into a mirror. Here he recasts youth violence not as simple depravity but as misdirected artistry: a botched attempt at making a mark on the world. The provocation is deliberate. By calling violence an "aspect" of the desire to create, he refuses the comforting story that violent kids are alien, broken, or beyond comprehension. He implies they are painfully ordinary in one respect: they want agency, intensity, and recognition.

The line works because it smuggles empathy inside a cold diagnosis. "Energy" is the key abstraction: neutral, plentiful, dangerous. Burgess suggests the problem is less an excess of evil than a shortage of channels - cultural, educational, economic - capable of metabolizing that energy into music, craft, work, or language. When those channels fail, destruction becomes a crude form of authorship, a way of writing yourself onto the street, the body, the news.

There is also a sly indictment of adult society. "They don't know how" sounds like a rebuke: who was supposed to teach them? Coming from a novelist obsessed with free will, conditioning, and the state, the subtext is that we love to punish outcomes while starving the inputs. Violence becomes a perverse creative act because the culture offers young people spectacle, consumption, and discipline, but not enough meaningful making. Burgess isn't excusing harm; he's challenging the lazy idea that order can be restored without imagination.