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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.

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
Art
Efforts
Sonnet
Shows
Considered
Mastered
Form
Begins
Substitute
Wells
Musical
Substitutes
Well
Begin
Mastery
Must
Poet
Craft
Effort
Formed
Show
Crafts
Fugue

More quotes by Anthony Burgess

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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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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.
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Every dogma has its day.
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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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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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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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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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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.
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Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Anthony Burgess
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Civilised my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
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Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
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Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess