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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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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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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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For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
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All novels are experimental.
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Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.
Anthony Burgess
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...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess
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Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
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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Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Anthony Burgess
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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess
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Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.
Anthony Burgess
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
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But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?
Anthony Burgess
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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!
Anthony Burgess