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I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.
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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A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
Anthony Burgess
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Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.
Anthony Burgess
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All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Anthony Burgess
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How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.
Anthony Burgess
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The snarling, whining, pampered, analphabetic humanoids of Hollywood emerge as garbage irrelevantly gilded with adventitious photogeneity.
Anthony Burgess
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Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth.
Anthony Burgess
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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.
Anthony Burgess
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It was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one's true feelings.
Anthony Burgess
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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! I was cured alright.
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.
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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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony Burgess
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Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.
Anthony Burgess
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To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
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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We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
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Even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.
Anthony Burgess
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
Anthony Burgess
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
Anthony Burgess
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Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
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It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
Anthony Burgess
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
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:
man
life
language
welly
read
british
people
felt
god
women
violence
real
book
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