Quote

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

A. S. Byatt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Books
Else
Book
Always
People
Expect
Interested
Everybody

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

Image
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
Image
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
A. S. Byatt
Image
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A. S. Byatt
Image
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
Image
It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Good writing is always new.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A. S. Byatt
Image
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt