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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

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
Always
Destructive
People
Dangerous
Books
Understand
Write
Book
Writing
Work
Destroyers

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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.
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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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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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 do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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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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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A. S. Byatt
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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 am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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.
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