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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

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
Anywhere
Write
Live
Writing
Love
Passive
Relative

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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 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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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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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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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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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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 think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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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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Good writing is always new.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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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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