ANTHONY BURGESS ON “A CLOCKWORK ORANGE”: “It is not, in my view, a very good novel, but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about 1960, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest [that the young criminals] were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment… There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy… Society, as ever, was put first.”

“The reviews it received not only failed to whet an appetite among prospective book-buyers: they were for the most part facetious and uncomprehending. What I had tried to write was, as well as a novella, a sort of allegory of Christian free will.” (here; this refers to the book, of course, not the movie.)