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
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.
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.
builds came certain historians looks novelist plot shapes sort tiny whereas
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
characters novels slowly stages
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
biography history needs novelist opposed writer
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
bodies either general longer novels spirit
In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.
writing novelists hated
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
novelists academic written
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
history arise novel
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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.
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.