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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
Revealing
Prevent
Fear
Self
Trying
Dreadful

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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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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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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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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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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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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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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Good writing is always new.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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