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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
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War
Americans
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Helping
Room
Furnish
Care
Rooms
Meanwhile
Must
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Leisure

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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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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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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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 was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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