A. S. Byatt Quotes

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

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.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

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.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I was no good at being a child.

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.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

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.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

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.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

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.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

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.

Things are not what they seem.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

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

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

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.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

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.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

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.

…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.

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.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

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.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.