English - Novelist | August 24, 1936 -
For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.
A. S. Byatt
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In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.
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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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I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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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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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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The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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