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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
Preserves
Philosopher
Vain
Mystery
Art
Tackle
Mysteries
Philosophers
Aesthetic

More quotes by 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.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
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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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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
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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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Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
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Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
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Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
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Every dogma has its day.
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But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.
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If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
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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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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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I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess