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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

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
Creation
Sword
Conditions
Mechanical
Law
Orange
Pens
Appropriate
Raise
Raises
Laws
Clockwork

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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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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.
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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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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.
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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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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.
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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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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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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.
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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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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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