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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

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
Ends
Bestsellers
Cottage
Cottages
Publishers
Agents
Hungry
Industry
Literature

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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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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.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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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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And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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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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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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