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… — 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 have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed… — 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
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers. — 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
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or… — 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
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
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
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
America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants. — 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
