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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
Flesh
Brain
Fear
Death
Body
Mind
Collagen
World
Sleek
Dissolution

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Lists are a form of power.
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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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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 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 am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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I was no good at being a child.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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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 am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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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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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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