List of A. S. Byatt Quotes

The Reading Eye Must Do The Work To Make Them Live, And So It Did, Again And Again, Never The Same Life Twice, As The Artist Had Intended.

I Do Not Want To Be A Relative And Passive Being, Anywhere. I Want To Live And Love And Write.

I Hated Being A Novelist When I Was 20 - I Had Nothing To Write About.

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.

There Is A Certain Aesthetic Pleasure In Trying To Imagine The Unimaginable And Failing, If You Are A Reader.

Literary Critics Make Natural Detectives.

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.

History, Writing, Infect After A Time A Man's Sense Of Himself.

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.

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.

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.

Don't You Find It Rather Heavy, To Have Everything Really In Front Of You – All The People Who Are Going To Matter, Whom You Haven't Met Yet, All The Choices You Are Going To Have To Make, Everything You Might Achieve, And All The Possible Failures – Unreal Now? The Future Flaps Round My Head Like A Cloud Of Midges.