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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
Shortcomings
Novels
Arise
Novel
History

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A. S. Byatt
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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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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
A. S. Byatt
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
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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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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?
A. S. Byatt