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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.

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
Doesn
Writing
World
Ease
Research
Free
Makes

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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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Things are not what they seem.
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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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...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.
A. S. Byatt
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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