Books Change Quotes by A. S. Byatt

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

— A. S. Byatt

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

“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

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

“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

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

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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

— A. S. Byatt

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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

“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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

I was no good at being a child.

— A. S. Byatt