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Quotes By A. S. Byatt

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
ScienceNovels Sex

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we’re going to be truthful.

A. S. Byatt
BestGreatWomen

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
Created Edge Writers

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 Easy Quite

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
GodWorkEither

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

A. S. Byatt
Certain Imagine Pleasure

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
Almost Hate Others

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.

A. S. Byatt
LoveBooks Less

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.

A. S. Byatt
Care Itself 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.

A. S. Byatt
WorkBrain Characters

I’d like to write the way Matisse paints.

A. S. Byatt
Paints

I’m more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they’re not.

A. S. Byatt
Books Everybody Interested

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
Deep Interested Moral

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
Feeling Thinking Together

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

A. S. Byatt
Reality Reasons Talking
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