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Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.

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
Blessed
Bird
Neither
Tree
Damned
Birds
Saved

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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
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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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As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
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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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Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
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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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Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.
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...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
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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.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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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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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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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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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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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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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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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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