Quote

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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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
Clearly
Ways
Creative
Form
Writing
Way
Psychotherapy
Sublime
Precisely

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
A. S. Byatt
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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 cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
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