A. S. Byatt's Quotes

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.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

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.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

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.

There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess.

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.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

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

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

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 don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

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.

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

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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

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.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

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.

It's a terrible poison, writing.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

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.