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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
Prose
Author
Unknown
Difficulty
Journey
Fiction
Work
Convey
Difficulties

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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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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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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All novels are experimental.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
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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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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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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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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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.
Anthony Burgess