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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
Moral
Look
Self
Looks
Always
Centred
Things
Interested
Deep
Belief

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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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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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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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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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Good writing is always new.
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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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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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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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