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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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
Creative
Form
Writing
Way
Psychotherapy
Sublime
Precisely
Clearly
Ways
More quotes by 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
We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
A. S. Byatt
Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
A. S. Byatt
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A. S. Byatt
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
A. S. Byatt
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
A. S. Byatt
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A. S. Byatt
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.
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
…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….
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
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
A. S. Byatt
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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
...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
A. S. Byatt
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.
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
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.
A. S. Byatt
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
