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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
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
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That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
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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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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
Anthony Burgess
If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
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You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.
Anthony Burgess
But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.
Anthony Burgess
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
Anthony Burgess
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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We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
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I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.
Anthony Burgess
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
