Quote

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

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
Belief
Overrated
Else
Shakespeare
Like
Rome
Anywhere
Atheism
Trade
Stratford
City
Trades
Cities
Vastly

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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
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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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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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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.
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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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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
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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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We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
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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.
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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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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
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