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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
Beginning
Stop
Start
Ends

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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The writer's life seethes within but not without.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Anthony Burgess
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Life is, of course, terrible.
Anthony Burgess
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
Anthony Burgess
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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Anthony Burgess
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laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
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Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
Anthony Burgess
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Anthony Burgess
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Anthony Burgess
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Anthony Burgess
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I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess