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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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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
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.
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
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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
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
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Anthony Burgess
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess
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
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.
Anthony Burgess
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
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?
Anthony Burgess
