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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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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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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.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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Good writing is always new.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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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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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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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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…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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