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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
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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
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess
When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
Anthony Burgess
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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
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.
Anthony Burgess
All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
