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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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
Certain
Trying
Unimaginable
Aesthetic
Failing
Reader
Imagine
Pleasure

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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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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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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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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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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...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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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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