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Once Upon A Time, When Men And Women Hurtled Through The Air On Metal Wings, When They Wore Webbed Feet And Walked On The Bottom Of The Sea, Learning The Speech Of Whales And The Songs Of The Dolphins, When Pearly-fleshed And Jewelled Apparitions Of Texan Herdsmen And Houris Shimmered In The Dusk On Nicaraguan Hillsides, When Folk In Norway And Tasmania In Dead Of Winter Could Dream Of Fresh Strawberries, Dates, Guavas And Passion Fruits And Find Them Spread Next Morning On Their Tables, There Was A Woman Who Was Largely Irrelevant, And Therefore Happy.

-A. S. Byatt

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Once Upon A Time,

A. S. Byatt

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Once Upon A Time, When Men And Women Hurtled Through The Air On Metal Wings, When They Wore Webbed Feet And Walked On The Bottom Of The Sea, Learning The Speech Of Whales And The Songs Of The Dolphins, When Pearly-fleshed And Jewelled Apparitions Of Texan Herdsmen And Houris Shimmered In The Dusk On Nicaraguan Hillsides, When Folk In Norway And Tasmania In Dead Of Winter Could Dream Of Fresh Strawberries, Dates, Guavas And Passion Fruits And Find Them Spread Next Morning On Their Tables, There Was A Woman Who Was Largely Irrelevant, And Therefore Happy.

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I Don't Only Write About English Literature; I Also Write About Chaos Theory And... Ants. I Can Understand Ants.

…my Solitude Is My Treasure, The Best Thing I Have.

I Think The Virtue I Prize Above All Others Is Curiosity.

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.

Autobiographies Tell More Lies Than All But The Most Self-indulgent Fiction.

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.

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.

One Does Not Remember The Winners. One Remains Haunted By The Losers.

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.

Never Stop Paying Attention To Things. Never Make Your Mind Up Finally. Do Not Hold Beliefs.

It's Because I'm A Feminist That I Can't Stand Women Limiting Other Women's Imaginations. It Really Makes Me Angry.

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.

She Devoured Stories With Rapacious Greed, Ranks Of Black Marks On White, Sorting Themselves Into Mountains And Trees, Stars, Moons And Suns, Dragons, Dwarfs, And Forests Containing Wolves, Foxes And The Dark.

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.

I Cannot Bear Not To Know The End Of A Tale. I Will Read The Most Trivial Things – Once Commenced – Only Out Of A Feverish Greed To Be Able To Swallow The Ending – Sweet Or Sour – And To Be Done With What I Need Never Have Embarked On. Are You In My Case? Or Are You A More Discriminating Reader? Do You Lay Aside The Unprofitable?

Art Does Not Exist For Politics, Or For Instruction- It Exists Primarily For Pleasure, Or It Is Nothing.

I Think There Are A Lot More Important Things Than Art In The World. But Not To Me.

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.

I Have A Dreadful Fear That The More You Try To Prevent Revealing The Self The More You Do.

Biographies Are No Longer Written To Explain Or Explore The Greatness Of The Great. They Redress Balances, Explore Secret Weaknesses, Demolish Legends.

When I Was A Child - In Wartime, Pre-television - Books Were My Life.

I Think The Names Of Colors Are At The Edge, Between Where Language Fails And Where It's At Its Most Powerful.

Everything Is Surprising, Rightly Seen.

Human Beings Love Stories Because They Safely Show Us Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

You Know, It's A Truism That Writers For Children Must Still Be Children Themselves, Deep Down, Must Still Feel Childish Feelings, And A Child's Surprise At The World.

I Am A Creature Of My Pen. My Pen Is The Best Of Me.

An Odd Phrase, "by Heart," He Would Add, As Though Poems Were Stored In The Bloodstream.

I Acquired A Hunger For Fairy Tales In The Dark Days Of Blackout And Blitz In The Second World War.

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.

Independent Women Must Expect More Of Themselves, Since Neither Men Nor Other More Conventionally Domesticated Women Will Hope For Anything, Or Expect Any Result Other Than Utter Failure.

Independent Women

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.

Books That Change You, Even Later In Life, Give You A Kind Of Electrical Shock As The World Takes A Different Shape.

I'm More Interested In Books Than People, And I Always Expect Everybody Else To Be, But They're Not.

Harm Can Come About Without Will Or Action. But Will And Action Can Avert Harm.

I Like Feeling My Way Into Different Minds And Experiences. It Comes Naturally And Always Has.

One Of The Reasons I've Gotten So Attached To Talking To Scientists Is That... They Know There Is A Reality.

The Reading Eye Must Do The Work To Make Them Live, And So It Did, Again And Again, Never The Same Life Twice, As The Artist Had Intended.

What Literature Can And Should Do Is Change The People Who Teach The People Who Don't Read The Books.

I Do Not Want To Be A Relative And Passive Being, Anywhere. I Want To Live And Love And Write.

Vocabularies Are Crossing Circles And Loops. We Are Defined By The Lines We Choose To Cross Or To Be Confined By.

Once Upon A Time, When Men And Women Hurtled Through The Air On Metal Wings, When They Wore Webbed Feet And Walked On The Bottom Of The Sea, Learning The Speech Of Whales And The Songs Of The Dolphins, When Pearly-fleshed And Jewelled Apparitions Of Texan Herdsmen And Houris Shimmered In The Dusk On Nicaraguan Hillsides, When Folk In Norway And Tasmania In Dead Of Winter Could Dream Of Fresh Strawberries, Dates, Guavas And Passion Fruits And Find Them Spread Next Morning On Their Tables, There Was A Woman Who Was Largely Irrelevant, And Therefore Happy.

Ice Burns, And It Is Hard To The Warm-skinned To Distinguish One Sensation, Fire, From The Other, Frost.

That Is Human Nature, That People Come After You, Willingly Enough, Provided Only That You No Longer Love Or Want Them.

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.

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.

It's A Terrible Poison, Writing.

I Was No Good At Being A Child.

He Felt Changed, But There Was No One To Tell.

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.

I Hated Being A Novelist When I Was 20 - I Had Nothing To Write About.

I Worry About Anthropomorphism As A Form Of Self-deception. (the Christian Religion Is An Anthropomorphic Account Of The Universe.)

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.... Storytelling Is Intrinsic To Biological Time, Which We Cannot Escape. Life, Pascal Said, Is Like Living In A Prison From Which Every Day Fellow Prisoners Are Taken Away To Be Executed. We Are All, Like Scheherazade, Under Sentence Of Death, And We All Think Of Our Lives As Narratives, With Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

The Minds Of Stone Lovers Had Colonised Stones As Lichens Clung To Them With Golden Or Grey-green Florid Stains. The Human World Of Stones Is Caught In Organic Metaphors Like Flies In Amber. Words Came From Flesh And Hair And Plants. Reniform, Mammilated, Botryoidal, Dendrite, Haematite. Carnelian Is From Carnal, From Flesh. Serpentine And Lizardite Are Stone Reptiles ; Phyllite Is Leafy-green.

I Think Vestigially There's A Synesthete In Me But Not Like A Real One Who Immediately Knows What Colour Wednesday Is.

You Are Safe With Me." "i Am Not At All Safe, With You. But I Have No Desire To Be Elsewhere.

Outside Our Small Safe Place Flies Mystery.

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.

Think Of This - That The Writer Wrote Alone, And The Reader Read Alone, And They Were Alone With Each Other.

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.

Things Are Not What They Seem.

Things Are Not What They Seem

No Mere Human Can Stand In A Fire And Not Be Consumed.

He Was Beautiful, That Was Always Affirmed, But His Beauty Was Hard To Fix Or To See, For He Was Always Glimmering, Flickering, Melting, Mixing, He Was The Shape Of A Shapeless Flame, He Was The Eddying Thread Of Needle-shapes In The Shapeless Mass Of The Waterfall. He Was The Invisible Wind That Hurried The Clouds In Billows And Ribbons. You Could See A Bare Tree On The Skyline Bent By The Wind, Holding Up Twisted Branches And Bent Twigs, And Suddenly Its Formless Form Would Resolve Itself Into That Of The Trickster.

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.

I Don't Like Gurus. I Don't Like People Who Ask You To Follow Or Believe. I Like People Who Ask You To Think Independently.

I Don't Understand Why, In My Work, Writing Is Always So Dangerous. It's Very Destructive. People Who Write Books Are Destroyers.

I Watch A Lot Of Sport On Television. I Only Watch Certain Sports, And I Only Watch Them Live - I Don't Think I've Ever Been Able To Watch A Replay Of A Match Or Game Of Which The Result Was Already Decided. I Feel Bound To Cheat And Look Up What Can Be Looked Up.

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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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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Young Girls Are Sad. They Like To Be; It Makes Them Feel Strong.

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.

What I Need To Write Well Is A Combination Of Heat, Light And Solitude.

History, Writing, Infect After A Time A Man's Sense Of Himself.

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.

...it Is Not Possible To Create The Opposite Of What One Has Always Known, Simply Because The Opposite Is Believed To Be Desired. Human Beings Need What They Already Know, Even Horrors.

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.

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

Only Write To Me, Write To Me, I Love To See The Hop And Skip And Sudden Starts Of Your Ink.

I Am A Profound Pessimist Both About Life And About Human Relations And About Politics And Ecology. Humans Are Inadequate And Stupid Creatures Who Sooner Or Later Make A Mess, And Those Who Are Trying To Do Good Do A Lot More Damage Than Those Who Are Muddling Along.

I Am Not An Academic Who Happens To Have Written A Novel. I Am A Novelist Who Happens To Be Quite Good Academically.

Pain Hardens, And Great Pain Hardens Greatly, Whatever The Comforters Say, And Suffering Does Not Ennoble, Though It May Occasionally Lend A Certain Rigid Dignity Of Manner To The Suffering Frame.

You Can Understand A Lot About Yourself By Working Out Which Fairytale You Use To Present Your World To Yourself In.

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.

As A Little Girl, I Didn't Like Stories About Little Girls. I Liked Stories About Dragons And Beasts And Princes And Princesses And Fear And Terror And The Four Musketeers And Almost Anything Other Than Nice Little Girls Making Moral Decisions About Whether To Tell The Teacher About What The Other Little Girl Did Or Did Not Do.

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.

I Grew Up With That Completely Fictive Idea Of Motherhood, Where The Mother Never Strayed From The Kitchen. All The Women In My Books Are Very Afraid That If They Do Anything With Their Minds They Won't Be Complete Women. I Don't Think My Daughters' Generation Has That Feeling.

There Is A Certain Aesthetic Pleasure In Trying To Imagine The Unimaginable And Failing, If You Are A Reader.

Literary Critics Make Natural Detectives.

There Are Things That Happen And Leave No Discernible Trace, Are Not Spoken Or Written Of, Though It Would Be Very Wrong To Say That Subsequent Events Go On Indifferently, All The Same, As Though Such Things Had Never Been.

In England, Everyone Believes If You Think, Then You Don't Feel. But All My Novels Are About Joining Together Thinking And Feeling.

Novels Arise Out Of The Shortcomings Of History.

Coherence And Closure Are Deep Human Desires That Are Presently Unfashionable. But They Are Always Both Frightening And Enchantingly Desirable. "falling In Love," Characteristically, Combs The Appearances Of The Word, And Of The Particular Lover's History, Out Of A Random Tangle And Into A Coherent Plot.

Falling In Love

For My True Thoughts Have Spent More Time In Your Company Than In Anyone Else's, These Last Two Or Three Months, And Where My Thoughts Are, There Am I, In Truth".

Lists Are A Form Of Power.

I'd Like To Write The Way Matisse Paints.

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.

…words Have Been All My Life, All My Life--this Need Is Like The Spider's Need Who Carries Before Her A Huge Burden Of Silk Which She Must Spin Out--the Silk Is Her Life, Her Home, Her Safety--her Food And Drink Too--and If It Is Attacked Or Pulled Down, Why, What Can She Do But Make More, Spin Afresh, Design Anew….

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.

She Didn't Like To Be Talked About. Equally, She Didn't Like Not To Be Talked About, When The High-minded Chatter Rushed On As Though She Was Not There. There Was No Pleasing Her, In Fact. She Had The Grace, Even At Eleven, To Know There Was No Pleasing Her. She Thought A Lot, Analytically, About Other People's Feelings, And Had Only Just Begun To Realize That This Was Not Usual, And Not Reciprocated.

Good Writing Is Always New.

Once You Get Older, People Stop Listening To What You Say. It's Very Agreeable Once You Get Used To It.

I Did A Lot Of My Writing As Though I Was An Academic, Doing Some Piece Of Research As Perfectly As Possible.

Creative Writing Was Not A Form Of Psychotherapy, In Ways Both Sublime And Ridiculuous, It Clearly Was, Precisely That.

Narrative Is One Of The Best Intoxicants Or Tranquilisers.

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.

Cyclists. I Really Hate Them. I Wish They Would Not Be So Self-righteous And Realise They Are A Danger To Pedestrians. I Wish Cyclists Would Not Vindictively Snap Off Wing Mirrors On Cars When They Were Trying To Cross In Front Of The Car At A Danger To Motorists And Pedestrians.

Funny Way To Spend Your Life, Though, Studying Another Chap's Versifying.

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