Quote

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

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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
Writing
Fact
Urges
Even
Fear
Prose
Strong
Page
Write
Pages
Death
Terms
Facts
Meet
Littles
Eternal
Little
Term
Urge

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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
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All novels are experimental.
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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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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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Every dogma has its day.
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It'll be your own torture, he said, serious. I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
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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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I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
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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.
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
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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.
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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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That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
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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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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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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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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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Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
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