Byatt Quotes
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Byatt Quotes & Sayings
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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
— A.S. Byatt
To a dusty shelf we aspire.
— A.S. Byatt
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.
— A.S. Byatt
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
— A.S. Byatt
Literary critics make natural detectives.
— A.S. Byatt
She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
— A.S. Byatt
He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.
— A.S. Byatt
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
— A.S. Byatt
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
— A.S. Byatt
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
— A.S. Byatt
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
— A.S. Byatt
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. — A.S. Byatt
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it. — A.S. Byatt
He had his own
ways of sublimation. — A.S. Byatt
ways of sublimation. — A.S. Byatt
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
— A.S. Byatt
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
— A.S. Byatt
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
— A.S. Byatt
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
— A.S. Byatt
Good writing is always new.
— A.S. Byatt
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
— A.S. Byatt
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
— A.S. Byatt
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. — A.S. Byatt
we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know. — A.S. Byatt
You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.
— A.S. Byatt
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
— A.S. Byatt
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that ... they know there is a reality.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
...bleached by darkness
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
Lists are a form of power.
— A.S. Byatt
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
— A.S. Byatt
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
— A.S. Byatt
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 ...
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
— A.S. Byatt
A metamorphosis ... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
— A.S. Byatt
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.S. Byatt
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
— A.S. Byatt
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
— A.S. Byatt
The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.
— A.S. Byatt
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
— A.S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one
sensation, fire, from the other, frost. — A.S. Byatt
sensation, fire, from the other, frost. — A.S. Byatt
On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.
— A.S. Byatt
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
— A.S. Byatt
You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere. — A.S. Byatt
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere. — A.S. Byatt
I was no good at being a child.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
— A.S. Byatt
Things are not what they seem.
— A.S. Byatt
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
— A.S. Byatt
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
— A.S. Byatt
How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
— A.S. Byatt
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
— A.S. Byatt
No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
— A.S. Byatt
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
— A.S. Byatt
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.
— A.S. Byatt
I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
— A.S. Byatt
But poets don't want homes
do they?
they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. — A.S. Byatt
do they?
they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. — A.S. Byatt
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
— A.S. Byatt
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
— A.S. Byatt
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
— A.S. Byatt
The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
— Jay Parini
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
— A.S. Byatt
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. — A.S. Byatt
"No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to. — A.S. Byatt
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
— A.S. Byatt
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
— A.S. Byatt