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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.

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
Feeling
Energy
Feelings
Expenditure
Clockwork
Expenditures
Evening
Bits
Small

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Every dogma has its day.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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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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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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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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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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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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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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