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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.

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
Black
Mark
Ranks
Rapacious
Stories
Mountain
Foxes
Moons
Sun
Marks
Devoured
Moon
Dragons
Sorting
Tree
Mountains
Suns
Stars
Forests
Dwarfs
Dark
Greed
Containing
White
Trees
Wolves

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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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…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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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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.
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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.
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
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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.
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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.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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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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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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...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.
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