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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

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

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
Anthony Burgess
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It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
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Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
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You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
Anthony Burgess
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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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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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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess