Best 138 quotes of A. S. Byatt on MyQuotes

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

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

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

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

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

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

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

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

Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

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.

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.

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".

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

Good writing is always new.

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

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

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

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

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

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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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

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.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

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 don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

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.

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

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

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.

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

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

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.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

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.

...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.