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

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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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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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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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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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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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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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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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
A. S. Byatt
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt