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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
Beings
Show
Shows
Ends
Stories
Human
Middles
Humans
Beginnings
Love
Safely

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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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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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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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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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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