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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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
Never
Efficient
Wants
State
Money
States
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
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
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
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
I didn't think I experimented.
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
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess
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
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
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
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
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
