Quote

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.

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
Tree
Current
Fire
Currents
Knowing
Particularly
Naming
Words
Sun
Remake
Two
Air
Remakes
Together
Speech
Coin
Mean
Anybody
Coins
World
Cold
Pool

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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
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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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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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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.
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