A. S. Byatt Quotes

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

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.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

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

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

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

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

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

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

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

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.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.

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

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

Lists are a form of power.

…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….

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

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

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

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.