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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.

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
Understand
Affair
States
Accept
Anything
Beings
Human
Beginning
Dorothy
Everything
Accepting
Alter
Humans
Learned
Beloved
Real
State
Passed
Love
Desire
Ego

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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.
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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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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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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 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.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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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