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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

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
Handicaps
Liability
Sanity
Mad
Living
World
Handicap

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As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
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A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
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Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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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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Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
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I didn't think I experimented.
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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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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
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Each man kills the thing he loves.
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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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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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
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When the State withers, humanity flowers.
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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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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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Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
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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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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
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When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
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