Quote

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

Anthony Burgess

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Art
Around
Hard
Crafts
Work
Rare
Sacred
Wall
Ought
Fire

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

Image
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess
Image
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
Image
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
Image
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
Image
That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
Anthony Burgess
Image
But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Anthony Burgess
Image
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess