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

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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.
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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.
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You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
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The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
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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.
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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.
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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
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I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.
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Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.
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Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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