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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

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
Read
Think
Thinking
Wrote
Reader
Writer
Alone

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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 am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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'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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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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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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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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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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I was no good at being a child.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt