Top 45 A. S. Byatt Quotes

One of the reasons I’ve gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that… they know there is a reality.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

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 like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

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

Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.

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

I think vestigially there’s a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what’s going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you’re writing about. It doesn’t encumber you, it makes you free.

When I was a child – in wartime, pre-television – books were my life.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 – I had nothing to write about.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

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.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They’re quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

I think that most of the children’s writers live in the world that they’ve created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children’s writers are the children.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it’s because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

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 world, which is restful.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It’s not that theory isn’t interesting, but it isn’t about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

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 brain.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I’m not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.

In my mind’s eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don’t take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, ‘What is he or she like,’ and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won’t be complete women. I don’t think my daughters’ generation has that feeling.

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness.

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 self-centred.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.

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 doing what they’re doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don’t feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

It’s because I’m a feminist that I can’t stand women limiting other women’s imaginations. It really makes me angry.

I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I’m quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I’m a failed scientist, and because I’m interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

It’s a terrible poison, writing.

There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It’s a mess.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.