A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy DBE– known as A. S. Byatt – is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 August 1936
hate thinking curiosity
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.
greatness secret balance
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
world absence reason
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.
writing way paint
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
writing novelists hated
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
book writing people
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
writing thinking venus
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.
writing ants literature
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
believe thinking people
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.
writing research pieces
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
novelists academic written
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
book later-in-life giving
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
war dark world
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
beautiful mirrors division
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.