A.S. Byatt quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from A.S. Byatt on Wise Famous Quotes.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

To a dusty shelf we aspire.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.

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

Literary critics make natural detectives.

She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.

He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

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

His forty-third year. His small time's end. His time-
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

He had his own
ways of sublimation.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither,

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that ... they know there is a reality.

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.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

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

...bleached by darkness

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

Lists are a form of power.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...

Good writing is always new.

We are a Faustian generation, my dear
we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an ending, that was the way it went.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

A metamorphosis ... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

I was no good at being a child.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne.

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

Things are not what they seem.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one
sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.

No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

All these are true and none. The place is there
Is what we name it, and is not. It is.

Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations.

Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

But poets don't want homes
do they?
they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?"
"No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it's a real cage.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself ...

He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.