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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.

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
Lines
Rush
Running
Runs
Reality
Colour
Look
Senses
Waugh
Looks
Touch
Evelyn
World
Direct
Dickens
Line
Colours
Taste
Louis

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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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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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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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Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
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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 is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A. S. Byatt
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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