Quote

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

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
People
Find
Front
Failures
Might
Haven
Round
Everything
Achieve
Rounds
Matter
Head
Clouds
Going
Choices
Mets
Flaps
Really
Possible
Heavy
Midges
Make
Rather
Havens
Unreal
Like
Future
Fronts
Cloud

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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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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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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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 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.
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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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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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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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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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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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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.
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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.
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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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