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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

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
Change
Book
People
Teach
Books
Literature
Read

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
A. S. Byatt
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I was no good at being a child.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
A. S. Byatt
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A. S. Byatt
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. Byatt
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt