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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
Show
Shows
Ends
Stories
Human
Middles
Humans
Beginnings
Love
Safely
Beings

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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
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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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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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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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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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