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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.

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
Mind
Collagen
World
Sleek
Dissolution
Flesh
Brain
Fear
Death
Body

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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
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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.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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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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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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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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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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.
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