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"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare."
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"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."

"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle."

"Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers."

"If I am communicating to my readers exactly what the White House believes on any certain issue, that's reporting to them an unvarnished, unfiltered version of what they - the Administration - believe."

"No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading."

"Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process."

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
Explore more quotes by Anthony Burgess

"In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations."

"Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace."

"Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?"

"A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey."

"What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

"You're a romantic, said Crabbe. 'You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull."

"Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines."

"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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