A. S. Byatt quotes

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
Man Long Time Long Time
"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
You World Research Free
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Science Sex Things Human
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Kindness Sex Feelings Talk
"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
Never Puzzle Who End
"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
You Hate Look Curiosity
"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
Research Doing Writing Possible
"I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants."
A. S. Byatt
Chaos Literature I Can About
"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."
A. S. Byatt
World Sexuality Know Reason
"Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs."
A. S. Byatt
Mind Stop Never Attention
"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
You People Believe Think
"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
Work People Always Dangerous
"I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War."
A. S. Byatt
War World Dark Fairy
"There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader."
A. S. Byatt
You Aesthetic Pleasure Trying
"It's a terrible poison, writing."
A. S. Byatt
Writing Poison Terrible
"Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends."
A. S. Byatt
Love Us Human Show
"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
You Think Easy Venus
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Teacher Fear Girl Anything
"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
Life Good Politics Stupid
"I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up."
A. S. Byatt
Sports Game Look Feel
"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
History Feel Will Know
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Work God You Believe
"You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in."
A. S. Byatt
You World Yourself Your
"The point of painting is not really deception or imitation."
A. S. Byatt
Painting Deception Point Imitation
"What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude."
A. S. Byatt
Light Solitude Well Heat
"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
Great Secret Legends Greatness
"In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist."
A. S. Byatt
World Soul Spirit Live
"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
Death Brain World Fear
"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
Good Character I Am Children
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Eyes Fire Mind Hot
"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
Myself You Look Always
"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
You Thinking Together Feel
"The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted."
A. S. Byatt
Freedom Grace Space True
"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
You Look Lose Things
"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
Women Never Generation Feeling
"I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me."
A. S. Byatt
Art Me World Think
"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
Good I Am Who Happens
"I'd like to write the way Matisse paints."
A. S. Byatt
Way Like Write Paints
"I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not."
A. S. Byatt
People Always More Books
"When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life."
A. S. Byatt
Life My Life Books Child
"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
Life Change You World
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Life You People Children
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Best Nature Better Language
"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."
A. S. Byatt
Hate Car Wish Trying
"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
World Children Think Live
"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
Me Together Look Always
"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
Work Brain I Am Feel
"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
Brain Mind Like Easy
"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
Me Real Think Who

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