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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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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
Hated
Write
Nothing
Writing
Novelist
Novelists

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
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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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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
A. S. Byatt
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
A. S. Byatt
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt