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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
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
Poet
Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
Pieces
Sure
Future
Unsure
Past
Acceptable
Character
Chess
Ignorant
Piece
Supposed

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Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
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And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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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.
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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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Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
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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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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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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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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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.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
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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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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.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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