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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

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
Satisfy
Serious
Artist
Doe
Needs

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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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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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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 ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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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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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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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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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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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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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
Anthony Burgess
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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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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
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
Anthony Burgess