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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
World
Ease
Research
Free
Makes
Doesn
Writing
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
A. S. Byatt
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. Byatt
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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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A. S. Byatt
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A. S. Byatt
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A. S. Byatt
You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
A. S. Byatt
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
A. S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
A. S. Byatt
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A. S. Byatt
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A. S. Byatt
