A. S. Byatt Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von A. S. Byatt:

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

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

A. S. Byatt

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

A. S. Byatt

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

A. S. Byatt

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

A. S. Byatt

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

A. S. Byatt

It's a terrible poison, writing.

A. S. Byatt

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.

A. S. Byatt

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

A. S. Byatt

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

A. S. Byatt

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

A. S. Byatt

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

A. S. Byatt

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

A. S. Byatt

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

A. S. Byatt

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

A. S. Byatt

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

A. S. Byatt

I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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.

A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

A. S. Byatt

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

A. S. Byatt

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

A. S. Byatt