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
art thinking important
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
feelings mind way
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
reading writing stones
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
thinking curiosity virtue
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
running reality world
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
sweet greed needs
I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
girl teacher nice
As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
lists form
Lists are a form of power.
falling-in-love desire plot
Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
would-be goes-on events
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
writing ink hops
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
believe thinking feelings
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
self moral-beliefs looks
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.
circles vocabulary lines
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.