English - Novelist | February 25, 1917 - November 22, 1993
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Anthony Burgess
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The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
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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.
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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
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If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
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The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.
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A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
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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.
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I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.
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I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.
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When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.
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