A. S. Byatt Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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

A. S. Byatt
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
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
A novel…is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches.

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
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.

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

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

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

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

A. S. Byatt