Quote

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
Never
Finally
Hold
Stop
Belief
Attention
Mind
Make
Paying
Things
Beliefs

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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 think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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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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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 watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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 hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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 acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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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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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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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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Good writing is always new.
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