Anthony Burgess - Book Quotes

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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Anthony Burgess

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.

Anthony Burgess

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

Anthony Burgess

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

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

Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

Anthony Burgess