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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.

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
University
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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?
Anthony Burgess
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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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!
Anthony Burgess
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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony Burgess
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess