A. S. Byatt Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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
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
…words have been all my life, all my life—this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out—the silk is her life, her home, her safety—her food and drink too—and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

A. S. Byatt
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

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

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

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

A. S. Byatt
I shall from time to time write a small Clue — so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded.

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

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

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

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

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

A. S. Byatt
Didactic rushes of information were a great shortcoming in returning travellers.

A. S. Byatt
And where may hide what came and loved our clay? as the Poet asked finely.

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

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

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

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

A. S. Byatt
Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

A. S. Byatt
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