226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

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

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.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

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

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

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

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.