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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

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
Theory
Literature
Understand
Write
Also
Writing
Ants
Chaos
English

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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.
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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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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 have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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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.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
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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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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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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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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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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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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