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If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

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
Evil
Perform
Facts
Colour
Clockwork
Good
Wounds
Organism
Appearance
Juice
Lovely
Wound
Devil
Organisms
Meaning
Orange
Fact
Toys

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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
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Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.
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He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
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Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
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Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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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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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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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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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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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
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I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
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Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
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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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