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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
Spectacular
Easier
Create
Devastate

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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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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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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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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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?
Anthony Burgess
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess
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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
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.
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
Anthony Burgess
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess