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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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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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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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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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Every dogma has its day.
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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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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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