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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Secret
Legends
Great
Explore
Explain
Greatness
Demolish
Weakness
Redress
Balance
Balances
Longer
Biographies
Written
Weaknesses

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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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.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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Good writing is always new.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
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