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The Trombones Crunched Redgold Under My Bed, And Behind My Gulliver The Trumpets Three-wise Silverflamed, And There By The Door The Timps Rolling Through My Guts And Out Again Crunched Like Candy Thunder. Oh, It Was Wonder Of Wonders. And Then, A Bird Of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal, Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now, Came The Violin Solo Above All The Other Strings, And Those Strings Were Like A Cage Of Silk Around My Bed. Then Flute And Oboe Bored, Like Worms Of Like Platinum, Into The Thick Thick Toffee Gold And Silver. I Was In Such Bliss, My Brothers.

-Anthony Burgess

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The Trombones Crunched Redgold

Anthony Burgess

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The Trombones Crunched Redgold Under My Bed, And Behind My Gulliver The Trumpets Three-wise Silverflamed, And There By The Door The Timps Rolling Through My Guts And Out Again Crunched Like Candy Thunder. Oh, It Was Wonder Of Wonders. And Then, A Bird Of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal, Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now, Came The Violin Solo Above All The Other Strings, And Those Strings Were Like A Cage Of Silk Around My Bed. Then Flute And Oboe Bored, Like Worms Of Like Platinum, Into The Thick Thick Toffee Gold And Silver. I Was In Such Bliss, My Brothers.

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Put It Off For A Bit. All Life Is Putting Off. Well, Not Entirely.

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.

I See What Is Right And Approve, But I Do What Is Wrong.

We All Need Money, But There Are Degrees Of Desperation.

Come With Uncle And Hear All Proper. Hear Angel Trumpets And Devil Trombones...you Are Invited!

When The State Withers, Humanity Flowers.

It May Not Be Nice To Be Good, Little 6655321. It May Be Horrible To Be Good. And When I Say That To You I Realize How Self-contradictory That Sounds. I Know I Shall Have Many Sleepless Nights About This. 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? Deep And Hard Questions, Little 6655321.

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. A Novelist Should Not Be Too Intelligent Either, Although He May Be Permitted To Be An Intellectual.

...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.

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.

In Two Thousand Years All Our Generals And Politicians May Be Forgotten, But Einstein And Madame Curie And Bernard Shaw And Stravinsky Will Keep The Memory Of Our Age Alive.

Life Is Sustained By The Grinding Opposition Of Moral Entities.

I Mean, There's Little Enough In This Life, Really, And You Only Find It Worth Living For The Odd Moments, And If You Think You're Going To Have Those Odd Moments Again, Then It Makes Life Wonderful And Have A Meaning.

Every Grain Of Experience Is Food For The Greedy Growing Soul Of The Artist.

Colonialism. The Enforced Spread Of The Rule Of Reason. But Who Is Going To Spread It Among The Colonizers?

Life's Only Choosing When To Die. Life's A Big Postponement Because The Choice Is So Difficult. It's A Tremendous Relief Not To Have To Choose.

It Is As Inhuman To Be Totally Good As It Is To Be Totally Evil.

When A Man Cannot Chose, He Ceases To Be A Man.

As A Chamber Hung Round About With Looking-glasses Represents The Face Upon Every Turn, Thus All The World Doth The Mercy And The Bounty Of God; Though That Be Visible, Yet It Discovers An Invisible God And His Invisible Properties.

Writers Are Rarely Their Own Best Critics, Nor Are Critics.

...the Essential Intention Is The Real Sin. A Man Who Cannot Choose Ceases To Be A Man.

Art Is Rare And Sacred And Hard Work, And There Ought To Be A Wall Of Fire Around It.

The Essence Of Pop Stardom Is Immaturity - A Wretched Little Pseudo-musical Gift, A Development Of The Capacity To Shock, A Short-lived Notoriety, Extreme Depression, A Yielding To The Suicidal Impulse.

Oh, It Was Gorgeosity And Yumyumyum. When It Came To The Scherzo I Could Viddy Myself Very Clear Running And Running On Like The Very Light And Mysterious Nogas, Carving The Whole Litso Of The Creeching World With My Cut-throat Britva.

I Have Heard Earnest American Sociologists Say That American Children Have A Right To The Divorce Experience As An Enriching Element Of An Advanced Civilisation.

We Only Need To Wear Shoes Because The British Built Roads Which Hurt Our Feet.

If I Had Died It Would Have Been Even Better For You Political Bratchnies, Would It Not, Pretending And Treacherous Droogs As You Are.' But All That Came Out Was Er Er Er.

It Was Like A Bird Of Rarest-spun Heaven Metal Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now.

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.

I Was Always On My Oddy Knocky.

You Don't Say, 'i've Done It!' You Come, With A Kind Of Horrible Desperation, To Realize That This Will Do.

Eat This Sweetish Segment Or Spit It Out. You Are Free.

What's It Going To Be Then, Eh?

With Both Agents And Publishers Hungry For Bestsellers, Literature Will Have To End Up As A Cottage Industry.

A Work Of Fiction Should Be, For Its Author, A Journey Into The Unknown, And The Prose Should Convey The Difficulties Of The Journey.

The Unconscious Mind Has A Habit Of Asserting Itself In The Afternoon.

It's Funny How The Colors Of The Real World Only Seem Really Real When You Watch Them On A Screen.

Bath Twice A Day To Be Really Clean, Once A Day To Be Passably Clean, Once A Week To Avoid Being A Public Menace.

The Writer's Life Seethes Within But Not Without.

Immortality Makes Sense Only When The Individual Soul Can Be Thought Of As Merging Into A Great Collective Mush Of Sainthood. If We Take Anything With Us Into The Next World, It Is Not What Survives In The Memories Of Our Relicts.

Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves.

Great Music, It Said, And Great Poetry Would Like Quieten Modern Youth Down And Make Modern Youth More Civilized. Civilized My Syphilised Yarbles.

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.

A Word In A Dictionary Is Very Much Like A Car In A Mammoth Motor Show - Full Of Potential But Temporarily Inactive.

The Next Morning I Woke Up At Oh Eight Oh Oh Hours, My Brothers, And As I Still Felt Shagged And Fagged And Fashed And Bashed And My Glazzies Were Stuck Together Real Horrorshow With Sleepglue, I Thought I Would Not Go To School.

Death Comes Along Like A Gas Bill One Can't Pay.

For No Man Is Damned Precisely Because God Hath Not Chosen Him, Because He Is Not Elected, But Because He Is A Sinner, And Doth Wilfully Refuse The Means Of Grace Offered.

A Haydn Symphony Had A Meaning For The Social Group That Listened To It. A Mahler Symphony Had A Meaning For The Man Who Composed It. Here Is The Difference Between The Classical And Romantic Attitudes To 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.

It Had Been A Wonderful Evening And What I Needed Now, To Give It The Perfect Ending, Was A Little Of The Ludwig Van.

I Was Cured All Right.

Do They Merit Vitriol, Even A Drop Of It? Yes, Because They Corrupt The Young, Persuading Them That The Mature World, Which Produced Beethoven And Schweitzer, Sets An Even Higher Value On The Transient Anodynes Of Youth Than Does Youth Itself.... They Are The Hollow Men. They Are Electronic Lice.

Beckett Does Not Believe In God, Though He Seems To Imply That God Has Committed An Unforgivable Sin By Not Existing.

Unforgivable Sin

The Adult Relation To Books Is One Of Absorbing Rather Than Being Absorbed.

Senseless Violence Is A Prerogative Of Youth, Which Has Much Energy But Little Talent For The Constructive.

Life Is, Of Course, Terrible.

If You Believe In An Unseen Christ, You Will Believe In The Unseen Christlike Potential Of Others.

Is It Better For A Man To Have Chosen Evil Than To Have Good Imposed Upon Him?

Fumbling For A Word Is Everybody's Birthright.

But, Brothers, This Biting Of Their Toe-nails Over What Is The Cause Of Badness Is What Turns Me Into A Fine Laughing Malchick. They Don't Go Into What Is The Cause Of Goodness, So Why Of The Other Shop?

The Trombones Crunched Redgold Under My Bed, And Behind My Gulliver The Trumpets Three-wise Silverflamed, And There By The Door The Timps Rolling Through My Guts And Out Again Crunched Like Candy Thunder. Oh, It Was Wonder Of Wonders. And Then, A Bird Of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal, Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now, Came The Violin Solo Above All The Other Strings, And Those Strings Were Like A Cage Of Silk Around My Bed. Then Flute And Oboe Bored, Like Worms Of Like Platinum, Into The Thick Thick Toffee Gold And Silver. I Was In Such Bliss, My Brothers.

Does God Want Goodness Or The Choice Of Goodness? Is A Man Who Chooses To Be Bad Perhaps In Some Way Better Than A Man Who Has The Good Imposed Upon Him?

The 21st Chapter Gives The Novel The Quality Of Genuine Fiction, An Art Founded On The Principle That Human Beings Change. ----- "a Clockwork Orange Resucked" Intro To First Full American Version 1986

Sanity Is A Handicap And Liability If You're Living In A Mad World.

A Perverse Nature Can Be Stimulated By Anything. Any Book Can Be Used As A Pornographic Instrument, Even A Great Work Of Literature If The Mind That So Uses It Is Off-balance. I Once Found A Small Boy Masturbating In The Presence Of The Victorian Steel-engraving In A Family Bible.

But Don't Think That It's A System Or A Culture Or A State Or A Person That Does The Letting Down. It's Our Expectations That Let Us Down. It Begins In The Warmth Of The Womb And The Discovery That It's Cold Outside. But It's Not The Cold's Fault That It's Cold.

Hitler Was A Teetotalitarian.

I've Always Felt That English Women Had To Be Approached In A Sisterly Manner, Rather Than An Erotic Manner.

There Is A Satisfactory Boniness About Grammar Which The Flesh Of Sheer Vocabulary Requires Before It Can Become A Vertebrate And Walk The Earth.

I Think Art Is Sublimated Libido. You Can’t Be A Eunuch Priest, And You Can’t Be A Eunuch Artist.

Women Thrive On Novelty And Are Easy Meat For The Commerce Of Fashion. Men Prefer Old Pipes And Torn Jackets.

How Wicked, My Brothers, Innocent Milk Must Always Seem To Me Now.

And, My Brothers, It Was Real Satisfaction To Me To Waltz-left Two Three, Right Two Three-and Carve Left Cheeky And Right Cheeky, So That Like Two Curtains Of Blood Seemed To Pour Out At The Same Time, One On Either Side Of His Fat Filthy Oily Snout In The Winter Starlight.

I Don't Write Out Of Fear. I Write Out Of A Strong Urge To Meet Death On Its Own Eternal Terms, Because The Fact Is That If You Write As Little As A Page Of Prose-even Bad Prose-that Is Eternal.

If You Expect The Worst From A Person, You Can't Ever Be Disappointed... The Pessimist Takes A Sort Of Gloomy Pleasure In Observing The Depths To Which Human Behaviour Can Sink. The More Sin He Sees, The More His Belief In Original Sin Is Confirmed. Everyone Likes To Have His Deepest Convictions Confirmed; That Is One Of The Most Abiding Of Human Satisfaction.

This Is Great Art, We've Been Told This By The Great Pundits Of Our Age. And In Consequence Why Should We Bother To Learn? There's Nothing More Delightful Than To Be Told, 'you Don't Have To Learn, My Boy. There's Nothing In It. Modern Art? There's Nothing In It.

John Kenneth Galbraith And Marshall Mcluhan Are The Two Greatest Modern Canadians That The U.s. Has Produced.

Welly, Welly, Welly, Welly, Welly, Welly, Well. To What Do I Owe The Extreme Pleasure Of This Surprising Visit?

But Where I Itty Now, O My Brothers, Is All On My Oddy Knocky, Where You Cannot Go. Tomorrow Is All Like Sweet Flowers And The Turning Vonny Earth And The Stars And The Old Luna Up There. ... And All That Cal.

It'll Be Your Own Torture," He Said, Serious. "i Hope To God It'll Torture You To Madness.

You Have No Idea How Pleasant It Is Not To Have Any Future. It's Like Having A Totally Efficient Contraceptive.

The Downtrodden Are The Great Creators Of Slang.

I Chart A Little First-list Of Names, Rough Synopsis Of Chapters, And So On. But One Daren't Overplan; So Many Things Are Generated By The Sheer Act Of Writing.

Any Book Has Behind It All The Other Books That Have Been Written.

Translation Is Not A Matter Of Words Only: It Is A Matter Of Making Intelligible A Whole Culture.

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.

The State Is Never So Efficient As When It Wants Money.

...we're A Government That Believes In Everybody Having The Illusion Of Free Will.

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.

Civilised My Syphilised Yarbles.

All Novels Are Experimental.

The Purpose Of Education Is To Fit Us For Life In A Civilised Community, And It Seems To Follow From The Subjects We Study That The Two Most Important Things In Civilised Life Are Art And Science.

But What I Do I Do Because I Like To Do.

There Is, In Fact, Not Much Point In Writing A Novel Unless You Can Show The Possibility Of Moral Transformation, Or An Increase In Wisdom, Operating In Your Chief Character Or Characters. Even Trashy Bestsellers Show People Changing. When A Fictional Work Fails To Show Change, When It Merely Indicates That Human Character Is Set, Stony, Unregenerable, Then You Are Out Of Field Of The Novel And Into That Of The Fable Or The Allegory. - From The Introduction Of The 1986 Norton Edition

For The Serious Artist Does Not Satisfy Needs

There Is, In Fact, Not Much Point In Writing A Novel Unless You Can Show The Possibility Of Moral Transformation, Or An Increase In Wisdom, Operating In Your Chief Character Or Characters.

I Conclude That There Is As Much Sense In Nonsense As There Is Nonsense In Sense.

All Human Life Is Here, But The Holy Ghost Seems To Be Somewhere Else.

Literature Is All, Or Mostly, About Sex.

Life Is A Wretched Gray Saturday, But It Has To Be Lived Through.

Laws And Conditions Appropriate To A Mechanical Creation, Against This I Raise My Sword-pen.

As We Are All Solipsists, And All Die, The World Dies With Us. Only Very Minor Literature Aims At Apocalypse.

Elgar Is Not Manic Enough To Be Russian, Not Witty Or Pointilliste Enough To Be French, Not Harmonically Simple Enough To Be Italian And Not Stodgy Enough To Be German. We Arrive At His Englishry By Pure Elimination.

All Art Preserves Mysteries Which Aesthetic Philosophers Tackle In Vain.

... A Clockwork Orange- And I Said: 'that's A Fair Gloopy Title. Who Ever Heard Of A Clockwork Orange?' Then I Read A Malenky Bit Out Loud In A Sort Of Very High Type Preaching Goloss: '- The Attempt To Impose Upon A Man, A Creature Of Growth And Capable Of Sweetness, To Ooze Juicily At The Last Round The Bearded Lips Of God, To Attempt To Impose, I Say, Laws And Conditions Appropriate To A Mechanical Creation, Against This I Raise My Swordpen-

Blessed Tree And Blessed Birds, That Were To Be Neither Saved Nor Damned.

This Must Be A Real Horrorshow Film If You're So Keen On My Viddying It.

He Said It Was Artificial Respiration, But Now I Find I Am To Have His Child.

The Practice Of Fiction Can Be Dangerous: It Puts Ideas Into The Head Of The World.

The Trouble Began With Forster. After Him It Was Considered Ungentlemanly To Write More Than Five Or Six Novels.

Language Exists Less To Record The Actual Than To Liberate The Imagination.

Then, Brothers, It Came. Oh, Bliss, Bliss And Heaven. I Lay All Nagoy To The Ceiling, My Gulliver On My Rookers On The Pillow, Glazzies Closed, Rot Open In Bliss, Slooshying The Sluice Of Lovely Sounds. Oh, It Was Gorgeousness And Gorgeosity Made Flesh.

Well, Well, Well, Well. If It Isn't Fat, Stinking Billygoat Billy-boy In Poison. How Art Thou, Thou Globby Bottle Of Cheap, Stinking Chip-oil? Come And Get One In The Yarbles, If You Have Any Yarbles, You Eunuch Jelly Thou.

I Didn't Think; I Experimented.

The Possession Of A Book Becomes A Substitute For Reading It.

Keep Away From Physicians. It Is All Probing And Guessing And Pretending With Them. They Leave It To Nature To Cure In Her Own Time, But They Take The Credit. As Well As Very Fat Fees.

It's Always Good To Remember Where You Come From And Celebrate It. To Remember Where You Come From Is Part Of Where You're Going.

To Devastate Is Easier And More Spectacular Than To Create.

I Was Very Lighthearted. This Often The Way When The Abandonment Of Personal Responsibility Is Enforced: Neither Wronged Innocence Or Just Guilt Can Seriously Impair The Sensation Of Freedom One Has.

Every Dogma Has Its Day.

One Goes On Writing Partly Because It Is The Only Available Way Of Earning A Living. It Is A Hard Way And Highly Competitive. My Heart Drops Into My Bowels When I Enter A Bookshop And See How Fierce The Competition Is...there Is Also A Privier Reason For Pushing On, And That Is The Hopeless Hope That Someday That Intractable Enemy Language Will Yield To The Struggle To Control It... Mastery Never Comes, And One Serves A Lifelong Apprenticeship. The Writer Cannot Retire From The Battle; He Dies Fighting.

Alex Like Groweth Up, Oh Yes.

Ignorance And Poverty Are The Best Condiments For The Great Feast Of The World, But The Inexperienced And Poor Are Never Invited To It.

Laugh And The World Laughs With You, Snore And You Sleep Alone.

That So Many Writers Have Been Prepared To Accept A Kind Of Martyrdom Is The Best Tribute That Flesh Can Pay To The Living Spirit Of Man As Expressed In His Literature. One Cannot Doubt That The Martyrdom Will Continue To Be Gladly Embraced. To Some Of Us, The Wresting Of Beauty Out Of Language Is The Only Thing In The World That Matters.

We Can Destroy What We Have Written, But We Cannot Unwrite It.

The Not-self Cannot Have The Bad, Meaning They Of The Government And The Judges And The Schools Cannot Allow The Bad Because They Cannot Allow The Self.

Suddenly, I Viddied What I Had To Do, And What I Had Wanted To Do, And That Was To Do Myself In; To Snuff It, To Blast Off For Ever Out Of This Wicked, Cruel World. One Moment Of Pain Perhaps And, Then, Sleep Forever, And Ever And Ever.

Without Class Differences, England Would Cease To Be The Living Theatre It Is.

The Important Thing Is Moral Choice. Evil Has To Exist Along With Good, In Order That Moral Choice May Operate. Life Is Sustained By The Grinding Opposition Of Moral Entities.

The Ideal Reader Of My Novels Is A Lapsed Catholic And Failed Musician, Short-sighted, Colour-blind, Auditorily Biased, Who Has Read The Books That I Have Read.

And I Sort Of Frowned About That, Thinking. 'you Felt Ill This Afternoon,' He Said, 'because You're Getting Better. When We're Healthy We Respond To The Presence Of The Hateful With Fear And Nausea. You're Becoming Healthy, That's All.

Evil Has To Exist Along With Good, In Order That Moral Choice May Operate.

Reviewers Do Not Read Books With Much Care . . . Their Profession Is More Given To Stupidity And Malice And Literary Ignorance Even Than The Profession Of Novelist.

To Be Left Alone Is The Most Precious Thing One Can Ask Of The Modern World.

Literature Ceases To Be Literature When It Commits Itself To Moral Uplift; It Becomes Moral Philosophy Or Some Such Dull Thing.

A Man Can Write One Book That Can Be Great, But This Doesn't Make Him A Great Writer-just The Writer Of A Great Book. . . I Think A Writer Has To Extend Very Widely, As Well As Plunge Very Deep, To Be A Great Novelist.

The Meal Was Pretentious - A Kind Of Beetroot Soup With Greasy Croutons; Pork Underdone With Loud Vulgar Cabbage, Potato Croquettes, Tinned Peas In Tiny Jam-tart Cases, Watery Gooseberry Sauce; Trifle Made With A Resinous Wine, So Jammy That All My Teeth Lit Up At Once.

If You Write Fiction You Are, In A Sense, Corrupted. There's A Tremendous Corruptibility For The Fiction Writer Because You're Dealing Mainly With Sex And Violence. These Remain The Basic Themes, They're The Basic Themes Of Shakespeare Whether You Like It Or Not.

A Novelist Should Not Be Too Intelligent Either, Although... He May Be Permitted To Be An Intellectual.

It Seems Priggish Or Pollyannaish To Deny That My Intention In Writing The Work Was To Titillate The Nastier Propensities Of My Readers. My Own Healthy Inheritance Of Original Sin Comes Out In The Book And I Enjoyed Raping And Ripping By Proxy. It Is The Novelist’s Innate Cowardice That Makes Him Depute To Imaginary Personalities The Sins That He Is Too Cautious To Commit For Himself.

If You Expect The Worst From A Person You Can Never Be Disappointed.

A Character, To Be Acceptable As More Than A Chess Piece, Has To Be Ignorant Of The Future, Unsure About The Past, And Not At All Sure Of What He's Supposed To Be Doing.

What Critics Often Ask For Is The Impossible, Though This May Be A Salutary Means Of Extending The Borders Of Art.

Only In England Is The Perversion Of Language Regarded As A Victory For Democracy.

If He Can Only Perform Good Or Only Perform Evil, Then He Is A Clockwork Orange—meaning That He Has The Appearance Of An Organism Lovely With Colour And Juice But Is In Fact Only A Clockwork Toy To Be Wound Up By God Or The Devil.

This Truth May Be Handled Either Sinfully Or Profitably; Sinfully As When It Is Treated On Only To Satisfy Curiosity, And To Keep Up A Mere Barren Speculative Dispute.... This Point Of Election... Is Not To Be Agitated In A Verbal And Contentious Way, But In A Saving Way, To Make Us Tremble And To Set Us Upon A More Diligent And Close Striving With God In Prayer, And All Other Duties.

If You Want To Be Considered A Poet, You Will Have To Show Mastery Of The Petrarchan Sonnet Form Or The Sestina. Your Musical Efforts Must Begin With Well-formed Fugues. There Is No Substitute For Craft... Art Begins With Craft, And There Is No Art Until Craft Has Been Mastered.

I Wrote Much Because I Was Paid Little. I Had No Great Desire To Leave A Literary Name Behind Me.

Delimitation Is Always Difficult. The World Is One, Life Is One. The Sweetest And Most Heavenly Of Activities Partake In Some Measure Of Violence - The Act Of Love, For Instance; Music, For Instance.

As We Grow Older, The Memories Of Early Life Brighten, Those Of Maturity And Senescence Grow Dim And Confused.

The Book I Am Best Known For, Or Only Known For, Is A Novel I Am Prepared To Repudiate: Written A Quarter Of A Century Ago, A Jeu D'esprit Knocked Off For Money In Three Weeks, It Became Known As The Raw Material For A Film Which Seemed To Glorify Sex And Violence. The Film Made It Easy For Readers Of The Book To Misunderstand What It Was About, And The Misunderstanding Will Pursue Me Till I Die. I Should Not Have Written The Book Because Of This Danger Of Misinterpretation.

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.

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