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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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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
Dark
Interior
Night
Ghosts
Good
Invite
Men
Interiors
Invites
Ghost
Wild
Firelight
Warm
Howling

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Lists are a form of power.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
A. S. Byatt
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt