The Art of Quotation (Part V)

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

A. S. Byatt, in the Introduction to her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000), wrote,

I should finally like to say something about the style of these essays. I quote extensively and at length. I tell the stories of books, I describe plots. When I first studied English, extensive quotation was a necessary part of the work of the critic. I. A. Richards showed his students that they were not really reading the words as they were written. He diagnosed and exposed stock responses. And whatever Leavis’s faults of dogmatic dismissal, irascibility prescriptiveness, he was a quoter of genius, and I increasingly look on my early readings of – and reading around, and following up of – those quotations as the guarantee, the proof, that we were all indeed engaged in the common pursuit of true judgment. 

She went on to say, “My quotations are like the slides in an art historical lecture – they are the Thing Itself.” 

Byatt was an extraordinary quoter: see, for example, her great “Van Gogh, Death and Summer” (included in her 1991 essay collection Passions of the Mind), in which she quotes passage after glorious passage from Van Gogh’s letters, celebrating his passionate love of color.