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

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
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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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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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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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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
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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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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 unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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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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