A. S. Byatt

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.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

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.

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

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

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

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.

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

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.