Quote

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.

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
Ease
Research
Free
Makes
Doesn
Writing
World

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

Image
As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A. S. Byatt
Image
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
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
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
Image
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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