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Anthony Burgess Quotes
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Anthony Burgess
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Violence among young people... is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
Anthony Burgess
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Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Anthony Burgess
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.
Anthony Burgess
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It was all a matter of a Goddess — dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.
Anthony Burgess
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.
Anthony Burgess
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I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
Anthony Burgess
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He would milk the white man.... The white man had more money than sense.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Anthony Burgess
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The word slang is vague and its etymology obscure. It suggests the slinging of odd stones or dollops of mud at the windows of the stately home of linguistic decorum.
Anthony Burgess
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I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.
Anthony Burgess
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Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Anthony Burgess
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Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally — that was a man's life.
Anthony Burgess
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It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Anthony Burgess
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Quote of the day
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and overemphasis. Compromise is its second name.
Enid Bagnold
Anthony Burgess
Born:
February 25, 1917
Died:
November 22, 1993
(aged 76)
Bio:
John Anthony Burgess Wilson who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess was an English writer and composer.
Known for:
Earthly Powers (1980)
The Wanting Seed (1962)
One Hand Clapping (1961)
Most used words:
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literature
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