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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.

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
Work
Convey
Difficulties
Prose
Author
Unknown
Difficulty
Journey
Fiction

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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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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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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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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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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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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Every dogma has its day.
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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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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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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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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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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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