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Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

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
Like
Civilized
Youth
Poetry
Modern
Music
Great
Make
Would
Clockwork

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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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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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.
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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.
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It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
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What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
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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.
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
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Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
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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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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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