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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
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Free
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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.
Anthony Burgess
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
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All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
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And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
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