Byatt's Quotes
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Byatt's Quotes & Sayings
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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
He had his ownways 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
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
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
...bleached by darkness
— 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
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
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
The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.
— A.S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish onesensation, fire, from the other, frost. — A.S. Byatt
On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.
— 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 was no good at being a child.
— 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
![Byatt's Quotes By A.S. Byatt: Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/byatts-quotes-by-a-s-byatt-533547.jpg "Byatt's Quotes By A.S. Byatt: Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with")
Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].
— A.S. Byatt
It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.
— 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
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
— A.S. Byatt
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
— 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
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
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
— 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
