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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
Fear
Self
Trying
Dreadful
Revealing
Prevent

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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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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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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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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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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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.
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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.
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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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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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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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