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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

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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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 think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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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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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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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 worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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Things are not what they seem.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
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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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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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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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.
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