A.S. Byatt Quotes & Sayings

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it. — A.S. Byatt

Everything is surprising, rightly seen. — A.S. Byatt

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that ... they know there is a reality. — A.S. Byatt

Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott ... who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too - — A.S. Byatt

She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because
she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband. — A.S. Byatt

It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King's - though he thought she did not know it - he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda's mind was precise and energetic. He wanted to make love to her too. — A.S. Byatt

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. — A.S. Byatt

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness. — A.S. Byatt

Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations. — A.S. Byatt

You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that."
"What I can't see - what I really can't see - is why everyone doesn't ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see - and get told what the Bible says about the poor - and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats - and eating huge beefsteaks - I can't see it."
"I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you. — A.S. Byatt

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

Pomona's Tom's age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name - so dangerous, don't you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts. — A.S. Byatt

Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. — 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

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like. — A.S. Byatt

Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle.
"I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-"
"Beautiful."
"Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening"
"It needn't."
"Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it."
"Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?"
"I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand? — A.S. Byatt

We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts of me. I could have stroked her, or gripped her, or licked her, all that long way back, but putting it off, waiting, keeping still, looking uninterested, was so much more exciting ... — A.S. Byatt

Good writing is always new. — A.S. Byatt

Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool. — A.S. Byatt

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free. — 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

He had said she was provocative; so she was, she needed to prove she was there to be seen; but the proof always, contradictorily, drove her to further uncertain agony of guilt and self-distaste. — A.S. Byatt

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine. — A.S. Byatt

She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist's eye saw she was puny, though my lover's eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost - and Regained. — A.S. Byatt

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry. — A.S. Byatt

He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not. — A.S. Byatt

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

There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly ... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate. — A.S. Byatt

You will not be here
I shall not be here
much longer.'
'Let us not think of time.'
'We have reached Faust's non-plus. We say to every moment "Verweile doch, du bist so schön," and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes.'
'We shall be exhausted.'
'And is not that a good state to end in? — A.S. Byatt

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated. — 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

Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying. — A.S. Byatt

She leads you on and baffles you," said Beatrice. "She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it. — A.S. Byatt

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

The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. — A.S. Byatt

We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness. — A.S. Byatt

The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children. — A.S. Byatt

She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. — 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

Failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements ... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. — A.S. Byatt

America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books. — A.S. Byatt

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased. — A.S. Byatt

She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure. — A.S. Byatt

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. — A.S. Byatt

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents. — A.S. Byatt

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up. — A.S. Byatt

Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. — A.S. Byatt

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark. — A.S. Byatt

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie. — A.S. Byatt

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence. — A.S. Byatt

I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But now I think -- it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? — A.S. Byatt

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. — A.S. Byatt

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. — 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

Ah," said Florence, grimly. "A woman has to be extraordinary, she can't just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can't have a degree. — A.S. Byatt

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

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ... — A.S. Byatt

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words. — A.S. Byatt

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions. — A.S. Byatt

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things. — A.S. Byatt

Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely - but not in the large plan - — A.S. Byatt

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing. — A.S. Byatt

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. — A.S. Byatt

All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there - in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. — A.S. Byatt

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform ... — A.S. Byatt

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. — A.S. Byatt

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. — A.S. Byatt

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

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating. — A.S. Byatt

His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies. — A.S. Byatt

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist. — A.S. Byatt

I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me."
"You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do. — A.S. Byatt

They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously?' he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously. — A.S. Byatt

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

Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn't she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent. — 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

We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. — A.S. Byatt

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination's work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for. — A.S. Byatt

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away - but oh how I sing in my gold cage. — A.S. Byatt

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. — A.S. Byatt

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

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

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. — A.S. Byatt

If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history. — A.S. Byatt

The boys asked themselves, naturally, if they could kill someone. Geraint had been brought up on tales of knights-at-arms and Icelandic warriors, but he did not imagine blood. Charles had disappointed his father by taking no pleasure in foxhunting or shooting. He rather thought he could not. Philip was not really listening to the conversation. He was looking at the juxtaposition of textures in the grass, the flowers, and the silks, and the very rapid colour changes that were taking place as the sky darkened. Browning and vanishing of red, efflorescence and deepening of blues. Tom imagines the thud and suck of a bomb, the flying stone and mortar, and could not quite imagine the crushing or burning of flesh. He thought of his own skull and his own ribs. Bone under skin and tendons. No one was safe — A.S. Byatt

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. — A.S. Byatt

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers. — A.S. Byatt

For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come "again" and began to learn to expect. — A.S. Byatt

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her. — A.S. Byatt

I was no good at being a child. — A.S. Byatt

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared. — A.S. Byatt

Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare's rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet. — A.S. Byatt

You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one. — A.S. Byatt

...bleached by darkness — A.S. Byatt

They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures - — A.S. Byatt

Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back. — A.S. Byatt

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]. — A.S. Byatt

Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an ending, that was the way it went. — A.S. Byatt