Top 160 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Lists are a form of power.”

— A. S. Byatt

2. “Things are not what they seem.”

— A. S. Byatt

3. “Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.”

— A. S. Byatt

4. “No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”

— A. S. Byatt

5. “Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

— A. S. Byatt

6. “That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.”

— A. S. Byatt

7. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

8. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

9. “You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.”

— A. S. Byatt

10. “I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.”

— A. S. Byatt

11. “On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.”

— A. S. Byatt

12. “Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.”

— A. S. Byatt

13. “I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.”

— A. S. Byatt

14. “Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.”

— A. S. Byatt

15. “A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.”

— A. S. Byatt

16. “I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.”

— A. S. Byatt

17. “She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature – at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead.”

— A. S. Byatt

18. “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”

— A. S. Byatt

19. “We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

— A. S. Byatt

20. “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.”

— A. S. Byatt

21. “Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.”

— A. S. Byatt

22. “My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away – but oh how I sing in my gold cage.”

— A. S. Byatt

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.”

— A. S. Byatt

26. “I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.”

— A. S. Byatt

27. “Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It’s very agreeable once you get used to it.”

— A. S. Byatt

28. “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

29. “I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.”

— A. S. Byatt

30. “I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live – I don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.”

— A. S. Byatt

31. “One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.”

— A. S. Byatt

32. “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

33. “You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

35. “I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.”

— A. S. Byatt

36. “Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.”

— A. S. Byatt

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “I was no good at being a child.”

— A. S. Byatt

38. “It’s because I’m a feminist that I can’t stand women limiting other women’s imaginations. It really makes me angry.”

— A. S. Byatt

39. “I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.”

— A. S. Byatt

40. “Good writing is always new.”

— A. S. Byatt

41. “Julian was good at being in love. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being in love was the state of unconsummated tension... One had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed for intimate friend from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated.”

— A. S. Byatt

42. “A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

— A. S. Byatt

43. “You are a born storyteller,” said the old lady. “You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.”

— A. S. Byatt

44. “No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet.”

— A. S. Byatt

45. “Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means – and with absolute sincerity – but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.”

— A. S. Byatt

46. “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

47. “Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.”

— A. S. Byatt

48. “It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.”

— A. S. Byatt

49. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

50. “Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying.”

— A. S. Byatt