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 don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and… — 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
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
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
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
My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I… — 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
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
There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating… — 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
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about. — 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
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write. — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude. — 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
