I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
“He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood… storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
“Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
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. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world,… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
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… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
“When the morning light came into the room it found them curled together in a nest of red and white sheets. It revealed also… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share
