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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

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
Flesh
Brain
Fear
Death
Body
Mind
Collagen
World
Sleek
Dissolution

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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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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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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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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