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
Work
Make
Intended
Never
Twice
Life
Reading
Eye
Artist
Live
Must

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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 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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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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I was no good at being a child.
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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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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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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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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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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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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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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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