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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.

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
Stop
Age
Used
People
Agreeable
Older
Listening

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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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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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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 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.
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Lists are a form of power.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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