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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.
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
Would
Particular
Carve
Like
Reading
Sets
Words
Hardly
Write
Notice
Wells
Stone
Might
Suppose
Well
Liked
Writing
Stones
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
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 watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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 am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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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Things are not what they seem.
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