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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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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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Culture
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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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 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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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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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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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.
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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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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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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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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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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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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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