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
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.
books love watching
You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.
book writing people
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
book later-in-life giving
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
book glasses ideas
There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
children book television
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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.
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.
book people
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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.
change book people
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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.