Famous Quotes by A.S. Byatt

“For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.”

When you long for someone when that part of you is silenced, it makes everything else seem empty, false.

You are safe only so long as you have to work to deserve your existence. That’s the paradox of art.

Stories are like genes… They keep on going, keep on changing. They are a kind of virus, which needs a living host in order to survive.

I cannot bear not to know the end of a story. I would read backward, I would read the last page first. I believe in the forward progression of time, in a story.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though they are no less real than those that are.

Life is thick with complexity. You can’t separate yourself out from it.

All human beings have a right, and duty, to learn, to know, to understand, to strive for wisdom. It is part of life itself.

Happiness is a kind of excitement and wisdom is a kind of calm. They can coexist, but it’s difficult.

It’s exhausting being a person, even more exhausting being a family. All the things you take for granted in yourself, the essential you, you become separate from.

Words are so powerful, they should only be used with intention and care, with love and the desire to save the world.

The greatest tragedy is not the brutality of the evil people, but rather the silence of the good people.

Love’s a problem for people who can’t live alone, who’ve only got half a soul. They see things through a glass darkly, through themselves, and can’t feel any other way.

Memory is the means by which we draw our past closer, making it more intimate, more immediate.

Fiction is the place where we explore the dead ends of our desires, where we can imagine the consequences of things we would never do.

The mind is a repository for things we cannot remember, the stories we tell ourselves, the lives we might have lived.

What we think is less than what we know; what we know is less than what we love; what we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent, we are so much less than what we are.

What you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.

In the end, all one has is one’s family. And all one’s mistakes are embodied in one’s family, if one has children.

Sometimes it’s good to give people the chance to change.

The truth does not belong to us, but it is in the pursuit of truth that we find meaning.