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

Categorized in : Happens Novelists Academic

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

change book people

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

dark night beach

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

balance greatness secret

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

dream song morning

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

pleasure doe art

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

color powerful thinking

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

safety design home

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

colour real thinking

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

flames clouds beautiful

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

self christian worry

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.

knowing fire mean

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

glasses book ideas

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the cir... by A. S. Byatt

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

circulation human-nature blood

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed. by A. S. Byatt

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

possession humans fire

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were sto... by A. S. Byatt

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

phrases heart add

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

frost ice fire

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

vocabulary lines circles

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.

feelings children world

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and... by A. S. Byatt

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

hops ink writing

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

nice girl teacher