A. S. Byatt Writing Quotations

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

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 don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

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.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

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

It's a terrible poison, writing.

Good writing is always new.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

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

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing...