A. S. Byatt Quotes
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.
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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.
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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.
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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
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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 see the shapes of things.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
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I shall from time to time write a small Clue - so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded.
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
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America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.
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It's a terrible poison, writing.
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If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.