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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.

-A. S. Byatt

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They Took To Silence.

A. S. Byatt

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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.

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I Am A Creature Of My Pen. My Pen Is The Best Of Me.

You Did Not So Much Mind Being -conventionally- Betrayed, If You Were Not Kept In The Dark, Which Was Humiliating, Or Defined Only As A Wife And Dependent Person, Which Was Annihilating.

I Acquired A Hunger For Fairy Tales In The Dark Days Of Blackout And Blitz In The Second World War.

Pain Hardens, And Great Pain Hardens Greatly, Whatever The Comforters Say, And Suffering Does Not Ennoble, Though It May Occasionally Lend A Certain Rigid Dignity Of Manner To The Suffering Frame.

No Mere Human Can Stand In A Fire And Not Be Consumed.

She Didn't Like To Be Talked About. Equally, She Didn't Like Not To Be Talked About, When The High-minded Chatter Rushed On As Though She Was Not There. There Was No Pleasing Her, In Fact. She Had The Grace, Even At Eleven, To Know There Was No Pleasing Her. She Thought A Lot, Analytically, About Other People's Feelings, And Had Only Just Begun To Realize That This Was Not Usual, And Not Reciprocated.

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.

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Creative Writing Was Not A Form Of Psychotherapy, In Ways Both Sublime And Ridiculuous, It Clearly Was, Precisely That.

I Think The Virtue I Prize Above All Others Is Curiosity.

It's A Terrible Poison, Writing.

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.

I Cannot Bear Not To Know The End Of A Tale. 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. Are You In My Case? Or Are You A More Discriminating Reader? Do You Lay Aside The Unprofitable?

On Buses And Trains, I Always Think About The Inexhaustible Variety Of Human Genes. We See Types, And Occasionally Twins, But Never Doubles. All Faces Are Unique, And This Is Exhilarating, Despite The Increasingly Plastic Similarity Of Tv Stars And Actors.

What I Need To Write Well Is A Combination Of Heat, Light And Solitude.

Where Would We Be Without Inhibitions? Theyre Quite Useful Things When You Look At Some Of The Things Humans Do If They Lose Them.

In England, Everyone Believes If You Think, Then You Don't Feel. But All My Novels Are About Joining Together Thinking And Feeling.

I Think There Are A Lot More Important Things Than Art In The World. But Not To Me.

You Can Understand A Lot About Yourself By Working Out Which Fairytale You Use To Present Your World To Yourself In.

I Was No Good At Being A Child.

The Individual Appears For An Instant, Joins The Community Of Thought, Modifies It And Dies; But The Species, That Dies Not, Reaps The Fruit Of His Ephemeral Existence.

One Of The Reasons I've Gotten So Attached To Talking To Scientists Is That... They Know There Is A Reality.

Art Does Not Exist For Politics, Or For Instruction- It Exists Primarily For Pleasure, Or It Is Nothing.

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.

Dorothy Was In That State Human Beings Passed Through At The Beginning Of A Love Affair, In Which They Desire To Say Anything And Everything To The Beloved, To The Alter Ego, Before They Have Learned What The Real Other Can And Can't Understand, Can And Can't Accept.

She Was A Logical Child, As Far As Children Go. She Did Not Understand How Such A Nice, Kind, Good God As The One They Preyed To, Could Condemn The Whole Earth For Sinfulness And Flood It, Or Condemn His Only Son To A Disgusting Death On Behalf Of Everyone. This Death Did Not Seem To Have Done Much Good.

Things Are Not What They Seem.

Things Are Not What They Seem

Outside Our Small Safe Place Flies Mystery.

I Watch A Lot Of Sport On Television. I Only Watch Certain Sports, And I Only Watch Them Live - I Don't Think I've Ever Been Able To Watch A Replay Of A Match Or Game Of Which The Result Was Already Decided. I Feel Bound To Cheat And Look Up What Can Be Looked Up.

Our Days Weave Together The Simple Pleasures Of Daily Life, Which We Should Never Take For Granted, And The Higher Pleasures Of Art And Thought Which We May Now Taste As We Please, With None To Forbid Or Criticise.

I Don't Understand Why, In My Work, Writing Is Always So Dangerous. It's Very Destructive. People Who Write Books Are Destroyers.

…my Solitude Is My Treasure, The Best Thing I Have.

Mine The Long Night The Secret Place Where Lovers Meet In Long Embrace In Purple Dark In Silvered Kiss Forget The World And Grasp Your Bliss

Cyclists. I Really Hate Them. I Wish They Would Not Be So Self-righteous And Realise They Are A Danger To Pedestrians. I Wish Cyclists Would Not Vindictively Snap Off Wing Mirrors On Cars When They Were Trying To Cross In Front Of The Car At A Danger To Motorists And Pedestrians.

I Don't Think It Is An Easy Thing To Write And Expect To Be Commercial, Even If You Are From Venus And A Hermaphrodite.

…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….

A Beautiful Woman, Simone Weil Said, Seeing Herself In The Mirror, Knows "this Is I." An Ugly Woman Knows With Equal Certainty, "this Is Not I." Maud Knew This Neat Division Represented An Over-simplification. The Doll-mask She Saw Had Nothing To Do With Her, Nothing.

That Is Human Nature, That People Come After You, Willingly Enough, Provided Only That You No Longer Love Or Want Them.

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.

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.

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.

Only Write To Me, Write To Me, I Love To See The Hop And Skip And Sudden Starts Of Your Ink.

I Have A Dreadful Fear That The More You Try To Prevent Revealing The Self The More You Do.

Funny Way To Spend Your Life, Though, Studying Another Chap's Versifying.

I Hated Being A Novelist When I Was 20 - I Had Nothing To Write About.

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I Am Not An Academic Who Happens To Have Written A Novel. I Am A Novelist Who Happens To Be Quite Good Academically.

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He Felt Changed, But There Was No One To Tell.

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The More Research You Do, The More At Ease You Are In The World You're Writing About. It Doesn't Encumber You, It Makes You Free.

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Books That Change You, Even Later In Life, Give You A Kind Of Electrical Shock As The World Takes A Different Shape.

I Don't Like Gurus. I Don't Like People Who Ask You To Follow Or Believe. I Like People Who Ask You To Think Independently.

I Did A Lot Of My Writing As Though I Was An Academic, Doing Some Piece Of Research As Perfectly As Possible.

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I Like Feeling My Way Into Different Minds And Experiences. It Comes Naturally And Always Has.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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".

I Think The Virtue I Prize Above All Others Is Curiosity. If You Look Really Hard At Almost Anybody, And Try To See Why They're Doing What They're Doing, Taking A Dig At Them Ceases To Be What You Want To Do Even If You Hate Them.

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.

Everything Is Surprising, Rightly Seen.

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There Are Many Ways Of Writing Badly About Painting... There Is An 'appreciative' Language Of Threadbare, Not Inaccurate, But Overexposed And Irritating Words... The Language Of The Schools Which 'situates' Works And Artists In Schools And Movements... Novelists And Poets [that] See Paintings As Allegories Of Writing.

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In Our World Of Sleek Flesh And Collagen, Botox And Liposuction, What We Most Fear Is The Dissolution Of The Body-mind, The Death Of The Brain.

Lists Are A Form Of Power.

Young Girls Are Sad. They Like To Be; It Makes Them Feel Strong.

Literary Critics Make Natural Detectives.

Ice Burns, And It Is Hard To The Warm-skinned To Distinguish One Sensation, Fire, From The Other, Frost.

An Odd Phrase, "by Heart," He Would Add, As Though Poems Were Stored In The Bloodstream.

Human Beings Love Stories Because They Safely Show Us Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

Good Writing Is Always New.

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Autobiographies Tell More Lies Than All But The Most Self-indulgent Fiction.

I'm Not Very Interested In Myself. I Do Have A Deep Moral Belief That You Should Always Look Out At Other Things And Not Be Self-centred.

Well, I Would Hardly Say I Do Write As Yet. But I Write Because I Like Words. I Suppose If I Liked Stone I Might Carve. I Like Words. I Like Reading. I Notice Particular Words. That Sets Me Off.

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