A. S. Byatt Quotes - Page 4

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

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.

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

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

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.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

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.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

It's a terrible poison, writing.

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

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.