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You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

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
Desperation
Horrible
Realize
Realizing
Come
Done
Kind

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How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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Well, well, well, well. If it isn't fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.
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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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A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
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I was always on my oddy knocky.
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Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.
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If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
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But what I do I do because I like to do.
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Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
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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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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
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...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
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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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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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The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986
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As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
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