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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

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
Although
Intelligence
Intelligent
Intellectual
Either
May
Permitted
Novelist
Novelists

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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.
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Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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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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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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