Quote

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

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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
Well
Liked
Writing
Stones
Would
Particular
Carve
Like
Reading
Sets
Words
Hardly
Write
Notice
Wells
Stone
Might
Suppose

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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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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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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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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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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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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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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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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.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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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.
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Things are not what they seem.
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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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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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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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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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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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