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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
Loses
Quite
Look
Humans
Without
Looks
Inhibitions
Things
Useful
Would
Lose

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Lists are a form of power.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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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'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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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She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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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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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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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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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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Good writing is always new.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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