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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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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
Part
Tolkien
Reason
Restful
World
Sexuality
Ill
Total
Absence
Almost
Read

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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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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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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 hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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I was no good at being a child.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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