Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste. A. S. Byatt More Quotes by A. S. Byatt More Quotes From A. S. Byatt It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark. A. S. Byatt darkmennight 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 word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. A. S. Byatt plotfalling-in-lovedesire In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds. A. S. Byatt weedeyefire I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war. A. S. Byatt darkwarworld Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. A. S. Byatt girlstrongyoung The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green. A. S. Byatt greenmindhair Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers. A. S. Byatt narrative I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do. A. S. Byatt peopleneedsthinking Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure. A. S. Byatt independent-womenindependentmen I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has. A. S. Byatt differentmindfeelings I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along. A. S. Byatt stupidtryingprofound Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban. A. S. Byatt airbooklying The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. A. S. Byatt eyeartistreading Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges. A. S. Byatt choicescloudspeople You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in. A. S. Byatt work-outuseworld Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying. A. S. Byatt chapsstudyway Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History. A. S. Byatt arisenovelhistory Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction. A. S. Byatt selflyingfiction It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry. A. S. Byatt make-me-angryfeministimagination She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark. A. S. Byatt starsmoondark
