Quote

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

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
Words
Poets
Inaccurate
Language
Schools
Allegory
Artist
Artists
Appreciative
School
Poet
Irritating
Many
Works
Movements
Writing
Painting
Paintings
Overexposed
Way
Movement
Badly
Allegories
Ways
Novelists
Threadbare

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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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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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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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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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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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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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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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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
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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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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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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
A. S. Byatt
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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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Things are not what they seem.
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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.
A. S. Byatt