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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
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Work
Difficulties
Prose
Author
Unknown
Difficulty
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Fiction

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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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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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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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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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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All novels are experimental.
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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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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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.
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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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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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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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