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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

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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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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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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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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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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.
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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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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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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
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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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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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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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I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
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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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And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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