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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
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Dramaturge
Journalist
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Literary Scholar
Novelist
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Furniture
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Americans
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
I was always on my oddy knocky.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
Anthony Burgess
It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
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
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.
Anthony Burgess
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
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
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess