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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
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Dramaturge
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
America
Divorce
Auras
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Solution
Serial
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England
Adultery
Theocratic
Even
Outside
Penalty
Itch
Like
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Clings
Death
Multiple
Polygamy
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European
Aura

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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.
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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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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.
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It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
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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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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
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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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The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.
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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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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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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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Every dogma has its day.
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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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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
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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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Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
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