A.S. Byatt Quotes

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

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

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

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

Things are not what they seem.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

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.

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

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

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

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

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

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.

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

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.

Lists are a form of power.

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

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.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

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.

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

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

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

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

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

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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.

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

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

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".

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

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.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

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

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.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

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

Good writing is always new.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

It's a terrible poison, writing.

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

Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.

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.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.