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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
Reason
Restful
World
Sexuality
Ill
Total
Absence
Almost
Read
Part
Tolkien
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
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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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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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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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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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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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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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.
A. S. Byatt
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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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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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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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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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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