A. S. Byatt
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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.
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.
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Beach
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.Collection: Safe
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.Collection: Taken
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.Collection: Thinking
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.Collection: Blood
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.Collection: Surprising
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.Collection: Powerful
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.Collection: Fire
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Dream
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.Collection: People
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.Collection: Art
Lists are a form of power.Collection: Lists
…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….Collection: Home
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Beautiful
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.Collection: Thinking
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Children
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.Collection: Doe
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.Collection: Best Of Me
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.Collection: Heart
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)Collection: Christian
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.Collection: Changed
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Weed
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.Collection: Book
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 blissCollection: Dark
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.Collection: Events
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Heartbreak
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".Collection: Two
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.Collection: Narrative
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.Collection: Looks