Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess lands this line like a half-smile with a knife behind it: not a neutral observation about taste, but a compact satire of how consumer culture launders power through “preference.” The phrasing does two jobs at once. “Thrive on novelty” flatters women with vitality, then yanks that vitality into a trap: “easy meat” reduces the subject to prey, and “commerce” becomes the hunter. The cruelty is deliberate. Burgess wants you to feel the sexist caricature as a mechanism, not just an opinion.

The second sentence completes the joke by swapping in a masculine self-myth: men as stoic custodians of the durable, loyal to “old pipes and torn jackets,” immune to marketing’s seductions. It’s a comic image, but also a dodge. The “torn jacket” isn’t just thrift; it signals an identity built on appearing above taste. That’s a form of consumption too: buying the pose of indifference, using shabby objects as proof of authenticity.

Context matters: Burgess wrote in a postwar Britain where consumer goods, advertising, and youth culture were rapidly remaking status. Fashion becomes an efficient scapegoat because it’s visible, feminized, and easy to moralize about. The subtext is less “women are frivolous” than “modernity sells desire by gendering it,” then congratulates men for thinking they’ve opted out.

Burgess’ sting is that everyone is implicated; he just chooses to indict women first, trusting irony to do the absolution work.