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

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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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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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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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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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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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Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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