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

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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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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.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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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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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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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I was no good at being a child.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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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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Things are not what they seem.
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