A. S. Byatt

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness.

The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

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

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.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

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

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

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.

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.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

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.

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.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.