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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

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
Instruction
Exists
Exist
Politics
Pleasure
Art
Doe
Nothing
Primarily

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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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 names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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Lists are a form of power.
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Good writing is always new.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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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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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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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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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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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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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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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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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