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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.

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
Safe
Desire
Elsewhere

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
A. S. Byatt
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
A. S. Byatt
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A. S. Byatt
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
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