Top 100 Byatt Quotes
#1. I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
Deborah Harkness
#2. Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.
Emma Donoghue
#3. A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
Jay Parini
#4. The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
Jay Parini
#5. You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
A.S. Byatt
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
#9. There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
A.S. Byatt
#10. Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
A.S. Byatt
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
A.S. Byatt
#14. 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
#15. They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures -
A.S. Byatt
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A.S. Byatt
#20. She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
A.S. Byatt
#21. Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A.S. Byatt
#22. One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that ... they know there is a reality.
A.S. Byatt
#23. 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
#24. Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.
A.S. Byatt
#25. 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
#26. I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
A.S. Byatt
#27. 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
#28. We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness.
A.S. Byatt
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. A metamorphosis ... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
A.S. Byatt
#34. I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A.S. Byatt
#35. 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
#36. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A.S. Byatt
#37. But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.
A.S. Byatt
#38. His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.
A.S. Byatt
#39. 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
#40. Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
A.S. Byatt
#41. I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.
A.S. Byatt
#42. 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
#43. For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come "again" and began to learn to expect.
A.S. Byatt
#44. 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
#45. It [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave.
A.S. Byatt
#46. She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because
she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband.
A.S. Byatt
#47. 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
#48. What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A.S. Byatt
#49. You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
A.S. Byatt
#50. You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
A.S. Byatt
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A.S. Byatt
#54. There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement.
A.S. Byatt
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
A.S. Byatt
#59. I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A.S. Byatt
#60. 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
#61. She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.
A.S. Byatt
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
A.S. Byatt
#66. 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
#67. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither,
A.S. Byatt
#68. We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech
but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun ...
A.S. Byatt
#69. The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.
A.S. Byatt
#70. 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
#71. What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A.S. Byatt
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A.S. Byatt
#75. I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A.S. Byatt
#76. My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
A.S. Byatt
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A.S. Byatt
#80. I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A.S. Byatt
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A.S. Byatt
#84. Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A.S. Byatt
#85. He had his own
ways of sublimation.
A.S. Byatt
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.
A.S. Byatt
#89. 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
#90. She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
A.S. Byatt
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Literary critics make natural detectives.
A.S. Byatt
#94. I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A.S. Byatt
#95. It is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
A.S. Byatt
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
A.S. Byatt
#99. 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
#100. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A.S. Byatt
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