Quote

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance music, for instance.

Anthony Burgess

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Music
Sweetest
Always
Activities
Love
Heavenly
Life
Instance
World
Measure
Activity
Violence
Difficult
Partake

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

Image
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Anthony Burgess
Image
But what I do I do because I like to do.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
Image
But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Anthony Burgess
Image
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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!
Anthony Burgess
Image
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
Anthony Burgess
Image
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Anthony Burgess
Image
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess