Quote

Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

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
Long
Mines
Silvered
World
Mine
Purple
Meet
Grasp
Secret
Bliss
Dark
Kiss
Forget
Kissing
Night
Lovers
Place
Embrace

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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.
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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Lists are a form of power.
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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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.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt