A. S. Byatt Quotes - Page 2

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

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

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.

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.

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

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.

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.

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

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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

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".

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.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.