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There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

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
Walks
Vertebrates
Become
Satisfactory
Earth
Grammar
Vocabulary
Sheer
Requires
Flesh
Walk
Vertebrate

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The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
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Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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 was cured all right.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
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You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
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If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.
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I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
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