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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

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
World
Art
Important
Things
Think
Thinking

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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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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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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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
A. S. Byatt
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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 think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
A. S. Byatt
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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A. S. Byatt
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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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