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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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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
Sun
Marks
Devoured
Moon
Dragons
Sorting
Tree
Mountains
Suns
Stars
Forests
Dwarfs
Dark
Greed
Containing
White
Trees
Wolves
Black
Mark
Ranks
Rapacious
Stories
Mountain
Foxes
Moons

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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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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
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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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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. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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 think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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