Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Anthony Burgess on "The Art of Fiction, No. 48" (1973):
[The afternoon is] a quiet time. It’s a time when one’s body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive—the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness.

I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

I do feel that the author has to know best about what he’s writing—from the viewpoint of structure, intention, and so on. The critic has the job of explaining deep-level elements which the author couldn’t know about. As for saying where—technically, in matters of taste and so on—a writer is going wrong, the critic rarely says what the author doesn’t know already.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.... 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.

I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture, especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition, and it often elevates ignorance into a virtue. Think of the musically illiterate who set themselves up as “arrangers.” And youth is so conformist, so little concerned with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure that it and it alone knows.

[Y]ou can’t be a genius and sexually impotent. I still think that inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact, a work of craft.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

One has to wait, I’m afraid—a long time sometimes—for the experience one’s had to present itself in workable form, as a form that can be shaped into something like a work of art.

I think there’s more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness.

Literature ... thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties.

I don’t ... think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life’s problems is.

Comedy is concerned with truth quite as much as tragedy; and the two, as Plato recognized, have something fundamental in common. They’re both stripping processes; they both tear off externals and show man as a poor forked animal. Satire is a particular kind of comedy, limiting itself to particular areas of behavior, not to the general human condition.

I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.