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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.

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
America
Divorce
Auras
Problem
Solution
Serial
Still
Solutions
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Looks
England
Adultery
Theocratic
Even
Outside
Penalty
Itch
Like
Moral
Penalties
Clings
Death
Multiple
Polygamy
Stills
European
Aura

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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
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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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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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 not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
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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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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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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I didn't think I experimented.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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Every dogma has its day.
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