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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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
Failing
Reader
Imagine
Pleasure
Certain
Trying
Unimaginable
Aesthetic

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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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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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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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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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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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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