A. S. Byatt Quotes

101 quotes in 1433 categories

• Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
• I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're…
• Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
• Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
• I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
• I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
• I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
• I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
• I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
• 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.
• I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
• I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
• I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
• I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his…
• I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
• I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
• I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be…
• In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
• In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the…
• There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

Browse A. S. Byatt Quotes by Category