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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
Write
Book
Writing
Work
Destroyers
Always
Destructive
People
Dangerous
Books
Understand

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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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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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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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.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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 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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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 watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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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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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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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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