A.S. Byatt

“...bleached by darkness”

— A.S. Byatt

“Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at…

— A.S. Byatt

“Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good…

— A.S. Byatt

“She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.”

— A.S. Byatt

“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language…

— A.S. Byatt

“All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It is .”

— A.S. Byatt

“He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.…

— A.S. Byatt

“ We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm,…

— A.S. Byatt

“Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained…

— A.S. Byatt

“She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did…

— A.S. Byatt

“…it will be possible, in the time of the wolf, to kill the gods.”

— A.S. Byatt

“She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes. She came to trust him with her…

— A.S. Byatt

“This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will…

— A.S. Byatt

“...I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by…

— A.S. Byatt

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth…

— A.S. Byatt

“He hesitated. “They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.” Maud smiled then. “Exactly. That’s it. What…

— A.S. Byatt

“The world of magic is double, natural, and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a…

— A.S. Byatt

“What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study…

— A.S. Byatt

“Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an…

— A.S. Byatt

“In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a…

— A.S. Byatt

“Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of…

— A.S. Byatt

“He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.”

— A.S. Byatt

“Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His…

— A.S. Byatt

“He always told them the same thing, to begin with. ‘Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about.…

— A.S. Byatt

“The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of…

— A.S. Byatt