Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Way
Chap
Life
Chaps
Studying
Spend
Study
Though
Funny
Another
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
A. S. Byatt
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
A. S. Byatt
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A. S. Byatt
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
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
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A. S. Byatt
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
A. S. Byatt
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
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
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.
A. S. Byatt
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
A. S. Byatt
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A. S. Byatt
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
A. S. Byatt
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?
A. S. Byatt
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
You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
A. S. Byatt
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
