226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

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 black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.

Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name – so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.

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.

We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique.

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.

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

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance.