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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
Writing
World
Ease
Research
Free
Makes
Doesn

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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 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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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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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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.
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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
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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.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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Good writing is always new.
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