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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.

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
Live
Ice
Trailing
Looks
Beast
Inscrutable
Mind
Hot
Weeds
Sea
Claws
Like
Huge
Commentary
Inchoate
Fire
Veins
Barnacles
Eyes
Shakespeare
Commentaries
Eye
Weed
Hump

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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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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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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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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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