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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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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess
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Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
Anthony Burgess
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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
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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess
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Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
Anthony Burgess
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
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You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
Anthony Burgess
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
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Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
Anthony Burgess
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...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess