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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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
Wells
Well
Need
Needs
Heat
Writing
Combination
Solitude
Write
Light
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
A. S. Byatt
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
A. S. Byatt
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
A. S. Byatt
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A. S. Byatt
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
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
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
A. S. Byatt
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
A. S. Byatt
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
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
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A. S. Byatt
...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.
A. S. Byatt
