A. S. Byatt Quotes about Writing

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

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.

Good writing is always new.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

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.

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.

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

It's a terrible poison, writing.

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

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

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.

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

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.