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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
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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
Dreadful
Revealing
Prevent
Fear
Self
Trying
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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Good writing is always new.
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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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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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Lists are a form of power.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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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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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A. S. Byatt
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
A. S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
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
I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
