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What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
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
Art
Extending
May
Borders
Mean
Critics
Impossible
Asks
Though
Means
Often
Salutary
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
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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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The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
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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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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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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
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
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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.
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It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.
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I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Anthony Burgess
Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Anthony Burgess
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
Anthony Burgess
