Quote

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
Reading
Sets
Like
Words
Hardly
Write
Notice
Wells
Stone
Might
Suppose
Liked
Well
Stones
Writing
Particular
Carve
Would

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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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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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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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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 know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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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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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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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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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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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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