"I think of my criticism as being “writer’s criticism.” I taught an extramural class for about ten years in London University, and I loved that because that was where I learned the novels you don’t read in an English literature degree. We did Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, and we did Thomas Mann, and we did Ulysses, and by the end of it I knew the novel, not just the English novel; I also understood that people of very varying backgrounds when reading novels were interested in almost everything. It teaches you respect for the lay reader."
--A.S. Byatt, in her "Art of Fiction" interview from 2001 in The Paris Review. Byatt (whose official website is here) won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Possession. But that is only one fragment of the English author's long list of publications.
I have never seen a picture of AS Byatt before. She certainly looks like her sister Margaret Drabble.
Posted by: Thomas at My Porch | March 01, 2011 at 11:02 AM
Oh that's particularly funny, Thomas, because I came THISCLOSE to using her quote in the interview about her biggest fear, when she was first publishing books, was being compared to her sister--who she said was writing more books, and faster.
:)
Posted by: Anna Clark | March 02, 2011 at 02:23 AM