Concerning the title
from Anthony Burgess' preface in the modern american prints:

"...I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

...I don't think I have to remind readers what the title means. Clockwork oranges don't exist, except in the speech of old Londoners. The image was a bizarre one always used for a bizarre thing. "He is as queer as a clockwork orange" meant he was queer to the limit of queerness. It did not primarily denote homosexuality, though a queer, before restricitve legislature came in, was the term used for a member of the inverted fraternity. Europeans who translated the title as Arancia a Orologeria or Orange Mécanique could not understand it Cockney resonance and they assumed that it meant a hand grenade, a cheaper kind of explosive pineapple. I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness."

Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression, "As queer [meaning strange] as a clockwork orange", but that he had found that other people read new meanings into it¹. For instance, some believed that the title
referred to a mechanically-responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay
for person). Rumour had it that Burgess had intended to name the work "A
Clockwork Orang" and was thus hypercorrected to the form we know. In his essay "Clockwork oranges"² he says that "this title would be appropriate for a
story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism
which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the
protagonist's conditional negativistic responses to feelings of evil which prevent
the exercise of his free will.

The book was inspired by an event in 1944, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn
was robbed and beaten by four US soldiers in a London street, which aborted the pregnancy³.