Quote

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.

A. S. Byatt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Fiction
Aids
Acknowledged
Caliban
Lying
False
Prophets
Incandescent
Truth
Shapes
Mixing
Sorcerer
Book
Telling
Minor
Scribes
Kind
Mines
Minors
Macbeth
Like
Mine
Witch
Witches
Air
Prophet
Prophetic
Prospero
Lies
Acknowledge
Puff
Scribe

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

Image
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
Image
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
Image
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
Image
…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….
A. S. Byatt
Image
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
A. S. Byatt
Image
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Image
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A. S. Byatt