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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

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
Life
Books
World
Change
Give
Electrical
Book
Shock
Giving
Shape
Different
Shapes
Even
Later
Kind
Takes

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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
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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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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.
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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.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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.
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...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.
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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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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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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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