Top 150 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Things are not what they seem.”

— A. S. Byatt

2. “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

3. “Lists are a form of power.”

— A. S. Byatt

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

12. “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

13. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

16. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

18. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

20. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

23. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

25. “I was no good at being a child.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

27. “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

28. “Good writing is always new.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

30. “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

31. “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

32. “He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

34. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

36. “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Did we not – did you not flame, and I catch fire?”

— A. S. Byatt

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Everything is surprising, rightly seen.”

— A. S. Byatt

44. “What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books.”

— A. S. Byatt

45. “Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.”

— A. S. Byatt

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

50. “It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.”

— A. S. Byatt