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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

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
Create
Devastate
Spectacular
Easier

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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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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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.
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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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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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