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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
State
Money
States
Never
Efficient
Wants

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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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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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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.
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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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.
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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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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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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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