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

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It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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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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Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
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You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
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The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.
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For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
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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.
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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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Every dogma has its day.
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This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
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This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
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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.
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The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986
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The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
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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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