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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.

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
Thinking
Feeling
Everyone
Feelings
Together
Joining
Feel
Novels
Feels
Believes
Believe
England
Think
Novel

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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Things are not what they seem.
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Good writing is always new.
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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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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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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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.
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Lists are a form of power.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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