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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
Nothing
Primarily
Instruction
Exists
Exist
Politics
Pleasure
Art
Doe
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
A. S. Byatt
I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
A. S. Byatt
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
A. S. Byatt
Lists are a form of power.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
A. S. Byatt
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.
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
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. Byatt
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
