Quote

…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….

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
Words
Pulled
Afresh
Home
Carrie
Anew
Need
Burden
Spider
Must
Safety
Spin
Needs
Drink
Silk
Make
Design
Attacked
Life
Huge
Spiders
Like
Food
Carries

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
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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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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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.
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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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.
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.
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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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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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 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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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
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Good writing is always new.
A. S. Byatt