Quote

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

Anthony Burgess

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Enough
Worth
Mean
Wonderful
Going
Living
Really
Makes
Think
Moments
Thinking
Littles
Life
Find
Odd
Little
Meaning

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

Image
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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
Image
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Image
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Image
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
Image
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
Image
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
Image
I didn't think I experimented.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
Image
If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Every dogma has its day.
Anthony Burgess
Image
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
Image
There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
Anthony Burgess
Image
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Anthony Burgess