A.S. Byatt Quotes
Top 97 wise famous quotes and sayings by A.S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from A.S. Byatt on Wise Famous Quotes.
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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.
She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
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.
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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.
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it.
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.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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 don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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.
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one
sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
do they?
they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.
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.
"No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.