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
detectives natural critics
Literary critics make natural detectives.
opposites needs horror
...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.
dark wife mind
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.
writing creative sublime
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
writing men
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...
real ego say-anything
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.
christian self worry
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
desire safe elsewhere
You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
two lasts months
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".
people want human-nature
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
stars dark moon
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.
independent independent-women men
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.
book glasses ideas
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.
people grace feelings
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.