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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
Priests
Artist
Art
Eunuch
Think
Sublimated
Thinking
Eunuchs
Libido
Priest

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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
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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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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
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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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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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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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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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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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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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