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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.

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
Really
Read
Retirement
Never
Peace
Helps
Life
Living
Wait
War
Americans
Comes
Listen
Helping
Room
Furnish
Care
Rooms
Meanwhile
Must
Waiting
Leisure

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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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Every dogma has its day.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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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 think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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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 aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
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