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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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I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
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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.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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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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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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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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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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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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All novels are experimental.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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