Quotes from A. S. Byatt

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

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.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

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.

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.

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