A. S. Byatt Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. S. Byatt
The names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it's most powerful.

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

A. S. Byatt
That is the main thing, to be alive. As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen.

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

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

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

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
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