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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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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
Must
Surprise
Feels
Writers
Children
Deep
World
Child
Feelings
Stills
Still
Truism
Feel
Childish

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I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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Lists are a form of power.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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I was no good at being a child.
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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.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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.
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