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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

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
Humans
Beginnings
Love
Safely
Beings
Show
Shows
Ends
Stories
Human
Middles

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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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Things are not what they seem.
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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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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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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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 acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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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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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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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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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.
A. S. Byatt