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
A. S. Byatt
I hated being a
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 – I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
I do not want
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A. S. Byatt
Good writing is always
Good writing is always new.
A. S. Byatt
I watch a lot
I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live – I don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
A. S. Byatt
There is a certain
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
The reading eye must
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.
A. S. Byatt
Autobiographies tell more lies
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
Dorothy was in that
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.
A. S. Byatt
I like feeling my
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt