Quote

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Anthony Burgess

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Impossible
Asks
Though
Means
Often
Salutary
Art
Extending
May
Borders
Mean
Critics

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

Image
I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
Anthony Burgess
Image
And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
Anthony Burgess
Image
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The writer's life seethes within but not without.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
Anthony Burgess
Image
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
Image
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
Image
As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I was cured all right.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess