A. S. Byatt Quotes

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

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

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

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

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

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.

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.

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer–like Macbeth’s witches–mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book–telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

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.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.