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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.

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
Indulgence
Autobiography
Lies
Fiction
Lying
Tell
Self
Autobiographies
Indulgent

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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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 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.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
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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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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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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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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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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