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I was always on my oddy knocky.

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
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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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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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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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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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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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.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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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.
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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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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
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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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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess