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.
More Quotes from Anthony Burgess:
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.Anthony Burgess
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
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
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
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.
Anthony Burgess
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess
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