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Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
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| Anthony Burgess
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and DIm, DIm being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter basard though dry...when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract.All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.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.Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions that when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it. Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.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. In America, visiting British writers are greeted at cocktail
parties by faculty wives with 'Can you screw as good as Dylan?'
-It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through. 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.The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being
absorbed.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.The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. 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.We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.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.Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. |
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