About A. S. Byatt: Dame Antonia Susan Duffy is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
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.
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 a...
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.
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.
In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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 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 think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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 ev...
In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.
It's a terrible poison, writing.
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
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 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.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
