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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
Avert
Harm
Action
Come
Without

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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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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Good writing is always new.
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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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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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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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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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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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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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 think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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