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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
A. S. Byatt
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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Give
Electrical
Book
Shock
Giving
Shape
Different
Shapes
Even
Later
Kind
Takes
Life
Books
World
Change
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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