A. S. Byatt

Novelist

1936-08-24 – 2023-11-16

English novelist, critic, and scholar whose fiction combined intellectual depth with formal experimentation. She received broad acclaim for works including Possession, which won the Booker Prize. Her career also included influential literary criticism and essays.

Quotes by A. S. Byatt

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.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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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.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
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We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness.
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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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.
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