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

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Give
Electrical
Book
Shock
Giving
Shape
Different
Shapes
Even
Later
Kind
Takes
Life
Books
World
Change

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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.
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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.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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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.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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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.
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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.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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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.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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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.
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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?
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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.
A. S. Byatt