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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

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
Loser
Winner
Remains
Remember
Doe
Haunted
Losers
Winners

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I was no good at being a child.
A. S. Byatt
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
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Lists are a form of power.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
A. S. Byatt
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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
A. S. Byatt
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. Byatt
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
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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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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt