A. S. Byatt Quotes

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A. S. Byatt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 24, 1936

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

A. S. Byatt

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

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

A. S. Byatt

It's a terrible poison, writing.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

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.

A. S. Byatt

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

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.

A. S. Byatt