Quote

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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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
Life
Reading
Eye
Artist
Live
Must
Work
Make
Intended
Never
Twice

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Things are not what they seem.
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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.
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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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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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.
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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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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.
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I was no good at being a child.
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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.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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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.
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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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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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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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