Quote

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

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
Night
Lovers
Place
Embrace
Long
Mines
Silvered
World
Mine
Purple
Meet
Grasp
Secret
Bliss
Dark
Kiss
Forget
Kissing

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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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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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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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…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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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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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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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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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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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.
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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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