A. S. Byatt Art Quotations

There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess.

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.

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.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing...

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.