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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

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
Prize
Curiosity
Virtue
Others
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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Lists are a form of power.
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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.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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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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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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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
A. S. Byatt
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I was no good at being a child.
A. S. Byatt
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
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