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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

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
Much
Circulation
Breath
Breaths
Blood
Nature
Part
Human
Humans
Narration

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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.
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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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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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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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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.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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