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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
Show
Increase
Fact
Characters
Facts
Possibility
Shows
Unless
Character
Novel
Operating
Writing
Wisdom
Chief
Much
Moral
Chiefs
Point
Transformation

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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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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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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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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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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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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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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.
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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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A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.
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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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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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