A. S. Byatt Quotes

I paint. I love the visual arts.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. I was exposed to it since I was very small.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

I am very much an artist. I like painting and collaging.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color.

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee . . . and the poetics of his paintings.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.