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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

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
Disappointed
Expect
Worst
Persons
Person
Never

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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 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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It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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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 art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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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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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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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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.
Anthony Burgess