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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
Feelings
Expenditure
Clockwork
Expenditures
Evening
Bits
Small
Feeling
Energy

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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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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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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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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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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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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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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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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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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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