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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.

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
Fiction
Aids
Acknowledged
Caliban
Lying
False
Prophets
Incandescent
Truth
Shapes
Mixing
Sorcerer
Book
Telling
Minor
Scribes
Kind
Mines
Minors
Macbeth
Like
Mine
Witch
Witches
Air
Prophet
Prophetic
Prospero
Lies
Acknowledge
Puff
Scribe

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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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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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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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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Things are not what they seem.
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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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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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I was no good at being a child.
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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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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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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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt