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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.

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
Life
Choices
Entities
Moral
Sustained
Evil
Operate
Order
Entity
May
Opposition
Important
Exist
Thing
Choice
Grinding
Good
Along
Clockwork

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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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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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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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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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