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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
Person
Never
Disappointed
Expect
Worst
Persons

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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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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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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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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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
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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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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
Anthony Burgess