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