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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

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
Upon
Evil
Better
Good
Men
Dystopia
Clockwork
Imposed
Chosen

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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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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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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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