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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

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
Dark
Blackouts
War
Blitz
World
Acquired
Fairy
Tales
Hunger
Second
Days
Blackout

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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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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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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.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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Lists are a form of power.
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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.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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.
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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.
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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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