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.

— A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt Quotes

The words men used to describe the gods were the words they used for fetters or bonds, things which held the world together, within bounds, preventing the breakout of chaos and disorder.

— A. S. Byatt

As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.

— A. S. Byatt

I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on.

— A. S. Byatt

Randolph Henry Ash’s Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of resurrection. Lord Leighton had painted her, distraught and floating, a golden figure in a tunnel of darkness. Blackadder.

— A. S. Byatt

Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past.

— 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 disintegration.

— A. S. Byatt

Reason must sleep,” said Christabel.

— A. S. Byatt

Ze probeerde zich zondig te voelen. Maar haar geest wendde zich af, naar waar hij levend was.

— A. S. Byatt

The movement of light and dark, the order of day and night and the seasons, was thus, the thin child understood, a product of fright, of the wolves in the mind. Order came from bonds and threatening teeth and claws.

— A. S. Byatt

Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.

— A. S. Byatt

You do look like a china doll,” said Dorothy, “one in a fairy story, standing on a shelf, that’s loved hopelessly by a tin soldier or a presumptuous mouse.

— A.S. Byatt

I was no good at group life. I hated school.

— A.S. Byatt

I wrote it for bookish children. Like myself, like you. For children despised because they read. To say, you can learn to live from books. Not didactically.

— A.S. Byatt

And you say – so kind you are – “I love you. I love you.” – and I believe – but who is she – who is “you”?

— A. S. Byatt

It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways – in life it is much otherwise.

— A. S. Byatt

We will remake language in our own images,” cried Culvert, “with our own kissings and sippings will we make new names for what we will do and be, for the relations between ourselves, and the relations between ourselves and the world.

— A.S. Byatt

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. ‘Falling in love’, characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot.

— A.S. Byatt

For the difference between poets and novelists is this – that the former write for the life of the language – and the latter write for the betterment of the world.

— A.S. Byatt

I am an instrument of control and have been an instrument of terror, and I can tell you much of the nature of control, and terror, and control by terror, which you do not now think you need to know. But.

— A.S. Byatt

I hate people who tell me I am to have a surprise and will not tell me what it is.’ ‘You do not like suspense?’ ‘No. No, I don’t. I like to know where I am. I am afraid of surprises.’ – Morpho Eugenia.

— A. S. Byatt
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