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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
Desire
Elsewhere
Safe

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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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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Lists are a form of power.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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 did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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