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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.

Anthony Burgess

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Anthony Burgess
Age: 76 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 25
Died: 1993
Died: November 22
Author
Autobiographer
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Dramaturge
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
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Doesn
Plunge
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Widely
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
Anthony Burgess
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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
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
Anthony Burgess
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Anthony Burgess
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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess
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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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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