Wealth & Money Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess delivers this line like a dry tap on the shoulder: yes, everyone wants money, but not everyone is being hunted by it. The first clause concedes the obvious in order to disarm you; the second clause quietly indicts a culture that treats financial pressure as a moral weather system. "Degrees" is the key word. It turns desperation into a spectrum rather than a switch, inviting us to notice how quickly comfort curdles into need, and how easily need becomes a justification for uglier choices.

Coming from Burgess, the subtext is almost autobiographical. He wrote at industrial speed, in part because he believed he needed to secure his family's future after a mistaken medical diagnosis. That experience shadows the sentence: money isn't just greed or ambition; it's a timer you can hear ticking in the next room. The line recognizes the way economic fear distorts creative life, not in a melodramatic "starving artist" myth, but in the banal arithmetic of rent, illness, dependents, and debt.

It also lands as a sly ethical argument. By separating "need" from "desperation", Burgess hints that society loves to flatten the difference so it can blame individuals for what is often structural. When desperation has degrees, so does responsibility. The quote works because it refuses purity tests: it doesn't absolve anyone, but it does demand that we account for the pressures that make compromise feel less like a choice and more like a narrowing corridor.