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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
Torture
Madness
Serious
Hope

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There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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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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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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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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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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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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This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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