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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

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
Would
Lose
Loses
Quite
Look
Humans
Without
Looks
Inhibitions
Things
Useful

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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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Things are not what they seem.
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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 don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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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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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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