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"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."
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"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."

"To 'pretend' is to say that I'm willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I'm unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren't true."

"To change reality, change your thoughts and perceptions."

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
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?"

"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."

"Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."
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