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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
Even
Hermaphrodite
Thing
Hermaphrodites
Think
Venus
Thinking
Commercial
Expect
Easy
Write
Writing
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Literary critics make natural detectives.
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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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….
A. S. Byatt
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
A. S. Byatt
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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