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When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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
Humanity
State
States
Withers
Flowers
Flower

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Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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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.
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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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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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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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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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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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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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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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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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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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