Quote

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

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
Warm
Fire
Skinned
Hard
Frost
Burns
Distinguish
Sensation
Sensations
Ice

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Things are not what they seem.
A. S. Byatt
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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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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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 hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
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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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
A. S. Byatt
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
A. S. Byatt
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt