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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

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
Book
Window
Shadows
Syllabus
Like
Pieces
Board
Rearranged
People
Vision
Boards
Constructing
Courses
Aesthetic
Stained
Course
Peculiar
Arranged
Pleasure
Glass
Visions
Form
Glasses
Lectures
Ideas
Shadow
Essays

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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Good writing is always new.
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.
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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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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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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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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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.
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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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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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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
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A. S. Byatt
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…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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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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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