A. S. Byatt People Quotations

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.

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

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.

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.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.