Quote

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.

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
Never
Days
Forbid
Life
Pleasure
Pleasures
Simple
Granted
Art
Daily
Thought
None
Together
Taste
May
Please
Criticise
Take
Higher
Weave

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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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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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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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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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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I was no good at being a child.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
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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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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt