Top 100 A.S. Byatt Quotes
#1. You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
A.S. Byatt
#2. Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back.
A.S. Byatt
#3. Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
#4. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
A.S. Byatt
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
A.S. Byatt
#9. Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A.S. Byatt
#10. One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that ... they know there is a reality.
A.S. Byatt
#11. For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
A.S. Byatt
#12. You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.
A.S. Byatt
#13. I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
A.S. Byatt
#14. I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
A.S. Byatt
#15. Ah," said Florence, grimly. "A woman has to be extraordinary, she can't just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can't have a degree.
A.S. Byatt
#16. 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
#17. I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.
A.S. Byatt
#18. He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn't give up their wrath, even if they needed to.
A.S. Byatt
#19. A metamorphosis ... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
A.S. Byatt
#20. I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A.S. Byatt
#21. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
A.S. Byatt
#22. I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
A.S. Byatt
#23. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott ... who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too -
A.S. Byatt
#24. here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here
A.S. Byatt
#25. You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
A.S. Byatt
#26. 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
#27. Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A.S. Byatt
#28. America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.
A.S. Byatt
#29. She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.
A.S. Byatt
#30. I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
A.S. Byatt
#31. She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.
A.S. Byatt
#32. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
A.S. Byatt
#33. My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away - but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
A.S. Byatt
#34. What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A.S. Byatt
#35. 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
#36. There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A.S. Byatt
#37. I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A.S. Byatt
#38. Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.
A.S. Byatt
#39. I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
A.S. Byatt
#40. I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A.S. Byatt
#41. I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
A.S. Byatt
#42. If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.
A.S. Byatt
#43. Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A.S. Byatt
#44. I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me."
"You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do.
A.S. Byatt
#45. In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.
A.S. Byatt
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Literary critics make natural detectives.
A.S. Byatt
#49. I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A.S. Byatt
#50. You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
A.S. Byatt
#51. I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
A.S. Byatt
#52. 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
#53. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A.S. Byatt
#54. Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
A.S. Byatt
#55. We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.
A.S. Byatt
#56. When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A.S. Byatt
#57. There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
A.S. Byatt
#58. Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
A.S. Byatt
#59. Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
A.S. Byatt
#60. Mine the long night
The secret place
Where lovers meet
In long embrace
In purple dark
In silvered kiss
Forget the world
And grasp your bliss
A.S. Byatt
#61. I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
A.S. Byatt
#62. I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.
A.S. Byatt
#63. 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
#64. I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
A.S. Byatt
#65. She leads you on and baffles you," said Beatrice. "She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it.
A.S. Byatt
#66. I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
A.S. Byatt
#67. 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.
A.S. Byatt
#68. Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A.S. Byatt
#70. He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else."
Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education.
A.S. Byatt
#71. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.
A.S. Byatt
#72. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished.
A.S. Byatt
#73. 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
#74. If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
A.S. Byatt
#75. I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
A.S. Byatt
#76. Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.
A.S. Byatt
#77. Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A.S. Byatt
#79. Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A.S. Byatt
#80. You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.
A.S. Byatt
#81. Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.
A.S. Byatt
#82. I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
A.S. Byatt
#83. The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.
A.S. Byatt
#84. An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A.S. Byatt
#85. Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations.
A.S. Byatt
#86. She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
A.S. Byatt
#87. I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A.S. Byatt
#88. One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A.S. Byatt
#89. The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.
A.S. Byatt
#90. I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
A.S. Byatt
#91. The truth is," said Florence, "that the women we are - have become - are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don't, there will be no help for us.
A.S. Byatt
#92. You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
A.S. Byatt
#93. They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously?' he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.
A.S. Byatt
#94. As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.
A.S. Byatt
#95. He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.
A.S. Byatt
#96. Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
A.S. Byatt
#98. The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains ... The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.
A.S. Byatt
#99. On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.
A.S. Byatt
#100. 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
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