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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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
Matisse
Paints
Paint
Write
Writing
Way
Like

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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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.
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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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I was no good at being a child.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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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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 do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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