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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

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
Another
Way
Chap
Life
Chaps
Studying
Spend
Study
Though
Funny

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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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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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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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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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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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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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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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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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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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 acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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