Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like. — 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 looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you… — 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
