Quote

...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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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
Always
Create
Desired
Possible
Opposite
Known
Believed
Human
Opposites
Humans
Horror
Need
Beings
Needs
Already
Even
Simply
Horrors

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A. S. Byatt
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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