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You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.

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
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Efficient
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Future
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Contraceptives

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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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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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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.
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If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
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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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The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986
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You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
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This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.
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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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For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
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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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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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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.
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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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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Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?
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Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.
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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
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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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