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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.

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
Cease
Commit
Becomes
Philosophy
Uplift
Literature
Commits
Moral
Ceases
Thing
Uplifting
Dull

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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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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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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 trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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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.
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There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
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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.
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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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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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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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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
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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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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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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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