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Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

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
Constructive
Youth
Talent
Violence
Energy
Littles
Little
Senseless
Much
Prerogative

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...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
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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!
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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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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?
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
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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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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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All novels are experimental.
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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.
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Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?
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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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But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.
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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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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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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.
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What's it going to be then, eh?
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