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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
Possession
Becomes
Reading
Book
Substitute
Substitutes

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There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
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The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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