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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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
Like
Matisse
Paints
Paint
Write
Writing
Way
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Good writing is always new.
A. S. Byatt
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
It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
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?
A. S. Byatt
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A. S. Byatt
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
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. Byatt
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
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
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
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt