A. S. Byatt Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.”

“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.”

“America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.”

“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.”

“I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.”

“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.”