Quotes from A. S. Byatt

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

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.

It's a terrible poison, writing.

Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

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

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

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.

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.

The true exercise of freedom is-can-nily and wisely and with grace-to move inside what space confines-and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.

There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

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

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

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

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

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.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

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.