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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

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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
Writing
Even
Hermaphrodite
Thing
Hermaphrodites
Think
Venus
Thinking
Commercial
Expect
Easy
Write

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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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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.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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