English - Novelist | August 24, 1936 -
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.
A. S. Byatt
FearGirlTeacherLittle GirlsNice
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.
KindnessSexFeelingsRepairTalk
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
MeThinkWednesdayRealColourLike
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.
LiveEyesFireMindEyeIce
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
MotherWomenMotherhoodThinkNever
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
GreatGreatnessLegendsExplore
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
ChaosLiteratureI CanUnderstand
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
LifeChangeWorldYouKindShape
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.
WomenGreatBestMenYouDone
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
PeopleMoreAlwaysExpectInterested
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.
MomentMeEvilDirectionInjustice
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.
DeathBookPuzzleEndSolutionFind
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