A. S. Byatt Book Quotations

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

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.

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.

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