Quote

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

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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
Sides
Fell
Removed
Ankle
Hand
Beach
Elegant
Overlapping
Dark
Touched
Phrase
Curled
Night
Possession
Asleep
Clothed
Hands
Took
Sat
Ankles
Back
Arms
Pale
Resting
Without
Silence
Comment
Slept
Side
Phrases
Progression
Comma

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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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.
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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.
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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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.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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…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….
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Things are not what they seem.
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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.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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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.
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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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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