I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but… — 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
You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings… — 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 am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself.… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that… — 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
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
