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I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
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
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Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Wrong
Right
Clockwork
Approve
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
The writer's life seethes within but not without.
Anthony Burgess
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
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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.
Anthony Burgess
Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
Anthony Burgess
Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Anthony Burgess
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Anthony Burgess
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
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
Anthony Burgess
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess
Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess
I didn't think I experimented.
Anthony Burgess
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
It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
Anthony Burgess
Life is, of course, terrible.
Anthony Burgess
