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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

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
Humans
Life
Ghost
Somewhere
Atheism
Holy
Else
Seems
Human

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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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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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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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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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The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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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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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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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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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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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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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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