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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

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
Victory
Democracy
Modern
Language
America
World
Perversion
Regarded
England

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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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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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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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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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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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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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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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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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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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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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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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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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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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