Top 65 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.