Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 February 1917
art mean may
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
children son civilization
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.
wise brother wine
The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.
art attitude men
A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
blessed bird tree
Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
practice ideas world
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
book fiction want
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.
fiction novel
All novels are experimental.
memories soul sainthood
Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
children divorce elements
I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.
art thinking libido
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
art philosopher mystery
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
brother real winter
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.
feelings evening energy
...but we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure...