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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.
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
Children
Deep
World
Child
Feelings
Stills
Still
Truism
Feel
Childish
Must
Surprise
Feels
Writers
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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
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
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
A. S. Byatt
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
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
A. S. Byatt
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. Byatt
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
A. S. Byatt
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A. S. Byatt
