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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

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
Work
Rare
Sacred
Wall
Ought
Fire
Art
Around
Hard
Crafts

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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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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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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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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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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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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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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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.
Anthony Burgess
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess