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A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
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
Much
Motor
Like
Dictionary
Potential
Car
Full
Word
Mammoth
Show
Inactive
Shows
Temporarily
More quotes by 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.
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Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
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Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
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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.
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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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This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
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Life is, of course, terrible.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
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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.
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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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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
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
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess
