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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?

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
Surprising
Extreme
Extremes
Pleasure
Wells
Well
Clockwork
Orange
Visit

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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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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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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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How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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All novels are experimental.
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