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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
World
Change
Give
Electrical
Book
Shock
Giving
Shape
Different
Shapes
Even
Later
Kind
Takes
Life
Books
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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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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I was no good at being a child.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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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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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
