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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
Birds
Saved
Blessed
Bird
Neither
Tree
Damned

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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.
Anthony Burgess
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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
Anthony Burgess
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Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.
Anthony Burgess
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The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.
Anthony Burgess
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
Anthony Burgess
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You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.
Anthony Burgess
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I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
Anthony Burgess
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I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
Anthony Burgess
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Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
Anthony Burgess
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All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Anthony Burgess
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I didn't think I experimented.
Anthony Burgess
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I was cured all right.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess
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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