Anthony Burgess Quotes - Page 5

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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

  Life, Mean, Thinking

  Anthony Burgess (2013). “One Hand Clapping”, p.91, Profile Books

  8 Copy quote

• A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

  Anthony Burgess

  Car, Shows, Dictionary

  Anthony Burgess (1964). “Language made plain”

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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

  Nature, Silly, Intelligent

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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• The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Adults, Relation

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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

  Children, Son, Civilization

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• This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Art, Boys, Age

  Televised BBC interview, 1968.

  7 Copy quote

• That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

  Anthony Burgess

  Men, Doubt, Literature

  "English Literature: A Survey for Students". Book by Anthony Burgess, 1958.

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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

  Done, Kind, Realizing

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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

  Fashion, Men, Novelty

  Anthony Burgess (1990). “You've had your time: being the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess”, Heinemann Educational Books

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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

  Art, Writing, Six

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• The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

  Anthony Burgess

  Wine, Vegetables, Meals

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• Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

  Anthony Burgess

  Rome, Cities, Atheism

  1963 Inside Mr Enderby, pt.2, ch.1.

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• One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

  Anthony Burgess

  Struggle, Writing, Heart

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• I was cured all right.

  Anthony Burgess

  A Clockwork Orange pt. 3, ch. 6 (1962)

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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

  Serious, Madness, Said

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.81, W. W. Norton & Company

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• But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sweet, Brother, Stars

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.204, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

  Erotic, England, Sisterly

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• Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

  Anthony Burgess

  Uncles, Angel, Devil

  Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess (1972). “A clockwork orange”, HarperCollins Publishers

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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!

  Anthony Burgess

  Lessons, Bogs, I've Learned

  "A Clockwork Orange". Book by Anthony Burgess, 1962.

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• I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

  Anthony Burgess

  Strong, Writing, Littles

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• Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

  Anthony Burgess

  Book, Reading, Average

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• And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.

  Anthony Burgess

  Kissing, Profound, Stories

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)”, p.204, W. W. Norton & Company

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• But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.

  Anthony Burgess

  Feelings, Energy, Evening

  Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess (1972). “A clockwork orange”

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• I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.

  Anthony Burgess

  Goes On, Ends

  Anthony Burgess, Earl G. Ingersoll, Mary C. Ingersoll (2008). “Conversations with Anthony Burgess”, p.51, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.

  Anthony Burgess

  Inspiration, Thinking, Lovely

  Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess (1972). “A clockwork orange”, HarperCollins Publishers

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