Anthony Burgess Professions : Writer Born : February 25, 1917 Died : November 22, 1993 Browse All Authors Top 171 quotes by Anthony Burgess 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 I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us. Anthony Burgess The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang. Anthony Burgess Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare. Anthony Burgess thinkers readers rare plentiful 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. Anthony Burgess bold try mistake country To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. Anthony Burgess write become certain art One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going. Anthony Burgess beyond going youth age 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. Anthony Burgess good you enjoy money 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. Anthony Burgess back things man want 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. Anthony Burgess thought think serious funny I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such. Anthony Burgess some-people writing funny people Similar Authors Ihab Hassan writer Ingmar Bergman writer Isabella Bird writer Ivan E. Coyote writer Al Feldstein writer Bert Sugar writer All Authors