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

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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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…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….
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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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.
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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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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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Lists are a form of power.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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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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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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