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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
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Dramaturge
Journalist
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Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Novelist
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Manchester
England
John Anthony Burgess Wilson
John Burgess Wilson
Joseph Kell
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More quotes by Anthony Burgess
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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As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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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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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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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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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
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
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To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
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Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
Anthony Burgess
Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like the very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.
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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!
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
Anthony Burgess
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
Anthony Burgess
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
Anthony Burgess
Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
