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 good-writing
Good writing is always new.
safe mystery safe-places
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
writing want and-love
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
book people
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
people listening age
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
thinking people palaces
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.
action harm avert
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
daughter mother book
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.
doe remember loser
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
history arise novel
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
clouds people choices
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.
reading eye artist
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.
children
I was no good at being a child.
children nice son
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.