226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

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

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

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

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

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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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

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

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.