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

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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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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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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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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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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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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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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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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 acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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