Quote

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

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
Two
Seemed
Carve
Right
Brother
Filthy
Real
Side
Pour
Time
Blood
Curtains
Snout
Like
Either
Fats
Oily
Sides
Brothers
Cheeky
Left
Satisfaction
Waltz
Three
Winter
Starlight

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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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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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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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