A. S. Byatt Quotes

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I like to play with tropes.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I've always said fantasy is sort of 'stealth philosophy'.

Everything for me becomes allegory.