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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

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
Consumed
Possession
Mere
Stand
Fire
Human
Humans

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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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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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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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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 hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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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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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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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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