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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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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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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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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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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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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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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
Anthony Burgess
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
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And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
Anthony Burgess
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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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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
Anthony Burgess
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Anthony Burgess