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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

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
Women
Result
Anything
Neither
Must
Independent
Men
Expect
Failure
Results
Conventionally
Since
Domesticated
Hope
Utter

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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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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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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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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.
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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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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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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.
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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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I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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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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