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
writing poison terrible
It's a terrible poison, writing.
narrative
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
imagination feminist make-me-angry
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
hair mind amber
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.
way study chaps
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
art simple together
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.
lying book air
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.
mind attention belief
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
reality talking scientist
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
writing ease world
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.
lying self fiction
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .
work-out world fairytale
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
children book numbers
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
sports thinking games
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.