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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

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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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Every dogma has its day.
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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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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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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.
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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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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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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.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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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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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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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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As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
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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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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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