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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
Potential
Car
Full
Word
Mammoth
Show
Inactive
Shows
Temporarily
Much
Motor
Like
Dictionary
More quotes by Anthony Burgess
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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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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The essence of pop stardom is immaturity - a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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.
Anthony Burgess
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
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How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
Anthony Burgess
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Anthony Burgess
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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
...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
Anthony Burgess
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
Anthony Burgess
