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It's a terrible poison, writing.

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
Poison
Terrible
Writing

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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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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.
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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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.
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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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