A.S. Byatt Quotes

…words have been all my life, all my life-this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out-the silk is her life, her home, her safety-her food and drink too-and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...

Good writing is always new.

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

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

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.

You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.

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

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because
she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband.

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.

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.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.