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

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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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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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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.
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A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
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I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
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I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
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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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Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.
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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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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.
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It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
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How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
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