Quote

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

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
Care
Literary
Book
Novelists
Even
Stupidity
Much
Profession
Ignorance
Books
Reviewers
Read
Novelist
Given
Malice

More quotes by 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
To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
Image
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
Image
All novels are experimental.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
Image
It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
Image
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
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
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
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.
Anthony Burgess
Image
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
Image
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Image
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
Image
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
Image
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
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
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess