Quote

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

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
Reality
Colour
Look
Senses
Waugh
Looks
Touch
Evelyn
World
Direct
Dickens
Line
Colours
Taste
Louis
Lines
Rush
Running
Runs

More quotes by 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
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A. S. Byatt
Image
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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
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
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
Image
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
A. S. Byatt
Image
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt