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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.

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
Eunuchs
Libido
Priest
Priests
Artist
Art
Think
Eunuch
Thinking
Sublimated

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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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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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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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It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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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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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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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.
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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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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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As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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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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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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