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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Anthony Burgess

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Anthony Burgess
Age: 76 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 25
Died: 1993
Died: November 22
Author
Autobiographer
Composer
Dramaturge
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Reading
Book
Substitute
Substitutes
Possession
Becomes

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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
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Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
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