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 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.
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.
art thinking important
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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...
art doe pleasure
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
thinking reader
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
ice fire frost
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
best great teach women
If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
believe either god novelist tells work
If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.
avoid failed interested mind quite simply
I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
children edge phantoms wander writers
I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.
blocks care color forms metaphor painting people reduced
I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
attempt human novels possessed science scientists
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
america books editors full less love people please readers sorts
America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.