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Literary critics make natural detectives.

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
Detectives
Literary
Critics
Natural
Make

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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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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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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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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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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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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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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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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.
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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