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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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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
Person
Humiliating
Much
Betrayed
Mind
Dependent
Defined
Kept
Wife
Dark
Annihilating
Persons
Conventionally

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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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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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.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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I was no good at being a child.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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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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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