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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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
Hold
Stop
Belief
Attention
Mind
Make
Paying
Things
Beliefs
Never
Finally
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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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 of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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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.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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Lists are a form of power.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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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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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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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.
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I was no good at being a child.
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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
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Good writing is always new.
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