Book Quote by A. S. Byatt

“I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.”

A. S. Byatt

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More by A. S. Byatt

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

A. S. Byatt

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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

A. S. Byatt

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“He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her…

A. S. Byatt

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…

A. S. Byatt

“Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed…

A. S. Byatt

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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.

A. S. Byatt

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I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will…

A. S. Byatt

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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

A. S. Byatt

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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world,…

A. S. Byatt

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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've…

A. S. Byatt

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“When the morning light came into the room it found them curled together in a nest of red and white sheets. It revealed also marks, all over the pale cool skin: handprints around the narrow waist, sliding impressions from delicate strokes, like weals, raised rosy discs where his lips had rested lightly. He cried out, when he saw her, that…

A. S. Byatt

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

A. S. Byatt

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Explore all 90 A. S. Byatt quotes

More Book quotes

I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not…

Aiden Wilson Tozer

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If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a billion locks and finally read a book in peace.

Aesop Rock

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Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who…

Andrew Lang

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The Rosary is the book of the blind.

Fulton J. Sheen

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I have many who keep me going, I am very fortunate in this sense. There is nothing like a child who knows more about…

Floyd Cooper

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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,…

Anna Quindlen

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It's like the query letter problem that I just mentioned, magnified a hundredfold. You might be good at telling a story, but that doesn't mean you know anything about marketing. Or layout. Or editing. Or publicity. Or selling your books for foreign markets.Everyone can point to a few examples of people that have done very well for themselves self-publishing. But…

Patrick Rothfuss