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There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
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
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Novel
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Wisdom
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Much
Moral
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
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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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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.
Anthony Burgess
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess
Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
Anthony Burgess
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
Anthony Burgess
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
Anthony Burgess
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Anthony Burgess