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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

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
Much
Leave
Name
Names
Desire
Literary
Littles
Wrote
Little
Paid
Great
Behinds
Writing
Behind

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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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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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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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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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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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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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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.
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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.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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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.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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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.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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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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