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
children feelings world
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
writing school artist
There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing...
stories love-story ends
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
real thinking colour
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
pain suffering may
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
heart phrases add
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
mean air two
We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech--but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun....
self trying revealing
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
dark night men
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
best-of-me possession creatures
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
blood human-nature circulation
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
powerful thinking names
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
beautiful flames wind
He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.
home safety design
…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….