Quote

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

A. S. Byatt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Immediately
Real
Think
Thinking
Like
Wednesday
Colour

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

Image
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
Image
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
A. S. Byatt
Image
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
A. S. Byatt
Image
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt