Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased Matt charcoal pinstriped light woolen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and same-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-colored dress, printed with blue moon flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.

— A.S. Byatt

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

— A.S. Byatt

A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

— A.S. Byatt

As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognize as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.

— A.S. Byatt

Black adder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marion, Child Harold, Ragnarök. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leaves. Leaves did to Black adder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Black adder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leaves’s comments on them, and burned them.

— A.S. Byatt

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.

— A.S. Byatt

But if you write a version of Ragnarök in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.

— A.S. Byatt

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

— 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".

— A.S. Byatt

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

— A.S. Byatt