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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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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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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
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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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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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 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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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 there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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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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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.
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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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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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