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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
Novelist
Novelists
Hated
Write
Nothing
Writing

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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.
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I was no good at being a child.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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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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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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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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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
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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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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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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 like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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