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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

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
Hope
Torture
Madness
Serious

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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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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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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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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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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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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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.
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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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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony Burgess
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
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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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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess