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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

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
Mysteries
Philosophers
Aesthetic
Preserves
Philosopher
Vain
Mystery
Art
Tackle

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Anthony Burgess
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
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Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
Anthony Burgess
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
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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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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
Anthony Burgess
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A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.
Anthony Burgess
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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 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.
Anthony Burgess
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess