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I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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
Thinking
Like
Gurus
People
Independently
Guru
Follow
Asks
Believe
Think
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A. S. Byatt
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A. S. Byatt
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A. S. Byatt
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
Things are not what they seem.
A. S. Byatt
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
A. S. Byatt
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
A. S. Byatt
Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
A. S. Byatt
She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
A. S. Byatt
