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

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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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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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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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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 think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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I was no good at being a child.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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Things are not what they seem.
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Lists are a form of power.
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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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