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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

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
Arise
Novel
History
Shortcomings
Novels

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Good writing is always new.
A. S. Byatt
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I was no good at being a child.
A. S. Byatt
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
A. S. Byatt
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Things are not what they seem.
A. S. Byatt
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt