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
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.
writing thinking venus
I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
writing ants literature
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
writing research pieces
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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.
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.
war dark world
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
beautiful mirrors division
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
detectives natural critics
Literary critics make natural detectives.
opposites needs horror
...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
dark wife mind
You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
writing creative sublime
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
writing men
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...
real ego say-anything
Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.