A.S. Byatt Quotes

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

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

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

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.

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

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.

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.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

...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.

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.

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

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

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

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

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

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

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.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

I was no good at being a child.

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

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.

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.

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

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

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

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

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

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

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

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

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.

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.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

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.

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

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo

The true exercise of freedom is-can-nily 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.