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Things are not what they seem.

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
Deceived
Seem
Seems
Things

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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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 like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
A. S. Byatt
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt