A. S. Byatt Quotes

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A. S. Byatt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 24, 1936

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

A. S. Byatt

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt