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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

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
Come
Without
Avert
Harm
Action

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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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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
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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 like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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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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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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