226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life...

It’s exhausting. When everything’s a deliberate political stance. Even if it’s interesting.

The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you’re writing about. It doesn’t encumber you, it makes you free.

On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.

Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.

You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.

Fowles has said that the nineteenth-century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I rather think that the opposite is the case – this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of characters – as well as providing a Greek chorus – than any first person mimicry.