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

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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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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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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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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.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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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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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