226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.

I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.

You are a born storyteller,” said the old lady. “You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.

A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.

I think we’ve had rather too much dirt rather than not enough. That’s not a prudish English remark, but a statement of saturation. These up-and-coming young men,” she splutters. “Penelope Fitzgerald – they think, ‘Ah! Middle-aged lady with frizzy hair and a nice smile; she must be writing tastefully.’ I say she’s writing against taste, quite savagely. But they don’t pick it up because they’re brash young men poncing about, waving their blood and thunder and condoms!

It’s because I’m a feminist that I can’t stand women limiting other women’s imaginations. It really makes me angry.

Julian was good at being in love. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being in love was the state of unconsummated tension... One had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed for intimate friend from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated.

He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.

Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.