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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Anthony Burgess
Age: 76 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 25
Died: 1993
Died: November 22
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Journalist
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
Anthony Burgess
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
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
But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess