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

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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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.
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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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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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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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I was no good at being a child.
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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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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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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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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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I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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