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
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....
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...
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.
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.
heart phrases add
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
stories love-story ends
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
would-be goes-on events
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
ice fire frost
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
two lasts months
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
people want human-nature
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
thinking reader
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
falling-in-love desire plot
Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
circles vocabulary lines
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
writing ink hops
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.