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Art
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Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
-Anthony Burgess
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Artist, The
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
-Anthony Burgess
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Authors & Writing
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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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Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
-Anthony Burgess
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Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
-Anthony Burgess, November, 1986
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
-Anthony Burgess
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Delinquency
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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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Fashion
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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, You've Had Your Time, 1990
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Hygiene
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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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Language
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The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
-Anthony Burgess
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The English language is being augmented every year by about 400 new words. We cannot cope. We are drowning in the plethora. It
-Anthony Burgess
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Life
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I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
-Anthony Burgess, One Hand Clapping, 1961
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Marriage
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The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.
-Anthony Burgess
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Money
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
-Anthony Burgess
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Reading
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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. 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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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
-Anthony Burgess
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Religion
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All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
-Anthony Burgess
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Violence
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
-Anthony Burgess
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Books by and about Anthony Burgess