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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
Devastate
Spectacular
Easier
Create

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
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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.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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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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.
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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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All novels are experimental.
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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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