A. S. Byatt Quotes

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

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I do...

The true exercise of freedom is-can-nily and wisely and with grace-to move inside what space confine...

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts...

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. ...

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and a...

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

Good writing is always new.

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this ...

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end...

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of S...

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more o...

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful...

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since...

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before he...

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

For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or t...

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little ga...

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the...

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which mu...

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

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

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because...

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot ...

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

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

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same l...

But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining o...

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to sch...

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge...

I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else...

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

They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriousl...

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

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vo...

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

As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ...

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with eac...

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...

In the end it wins a king's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does s...

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months ...

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good G...

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the fi...

The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at t...

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

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed f...

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

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

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a cultu...

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

it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and sl...