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I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

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
Neither
Wronged
Personal
Enforced
Responsibility
Abandonment
Freedom
Sensation
Often
Sensations
Way
Innocence
Guilt
Impair
Seriously
Lighthearted

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It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
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There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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Every dogma has its day.
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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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Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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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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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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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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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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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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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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