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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.

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
Self
Looks
Always
Centred
Things
Interested
Deep
Belief
Moral
Look

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt