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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.

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
Many
Number
Children
Students
Really
Numbers
People
Since
Surprising
Literature
Including
Language
Havens
Tell
Haven
Book
Lived

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
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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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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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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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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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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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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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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt