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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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Goodness
Men
Choice
Perhaps
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Doe
Clockwork
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Chooses
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.
Anthony Burgess
Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
Anthony Burgess
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
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
...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess
Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.
Anthony Burgess
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
Anthony Burgess
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
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
Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
Anthony Burgess
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?
Anthony Burgess
I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
Anthony Burgess
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess
Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
