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
christian self worry
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
writing creative sublime
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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.
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.
writing men
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...
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.
girl strong young
Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.
greatness secret balance
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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.
history arise novel
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
children nice son
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
thinking curiosity virtue
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
clouds people choices
Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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.