Quote

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

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
Things
Useful
Would
Lose
Loses
Quite
Look
Humans
Without
Looks
Inhibitions

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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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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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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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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'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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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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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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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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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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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.
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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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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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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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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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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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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