In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we… — 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
