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

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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
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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.
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Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
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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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Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
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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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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.
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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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And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
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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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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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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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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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