Quote

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

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
Equal
Neat
Knew
Division
Seeing
Mask
Woman
Mirror
Weil
Beautiful
Certainty
Doll
Nothing
Mirrors
Simplification
Ugly
Dolls
Saws
Represented

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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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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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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.
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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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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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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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.
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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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There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
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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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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.
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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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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt