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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
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Books
Maintains
Values
Contain
Read
Wasted
Money
Furniture
Persons
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Person
Americans
Book
Value
Cunningly

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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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Life is, of course, terrible.
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You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
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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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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
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The writer's life seethes within but not without.
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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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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
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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 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986
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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.
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What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
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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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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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Every dogma has its day.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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