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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

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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
Ways
Novelists
Threadbare
Words
Poets
Inaccurate
Language
Schools
Allegory
Artist
Artists
Appreciative
School
Poet
Irritating
Many
Works
Movements
Writing
Painting
Paintings
Overexposed
Way
Movement
Badly
Allegories

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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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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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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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 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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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