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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

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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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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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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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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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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
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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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Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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