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A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.
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
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Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Supposed
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
I didn't think I experimented.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
Anthony Burgess
I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
Anthony Burgess
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Anthony Burgess
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
Anthony Burgess
Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Anthony Burgess
It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
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
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
Anthony Burgess
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Anthony Burgess
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
