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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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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
Read
Wasted
Money
Furniture
Persons
Bought
Person
Americans
Book
Value
Cunningly
Looks
Fiction
Unread
Like
Books
Maintains
Values
Contain

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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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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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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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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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
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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.
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
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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.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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 possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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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