I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live – I don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
It’s because I’m a feminist that I can’t stand women limiting other women’s imaginations. It really makes me angry. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
The true exercise of freedom is – cannily and wisely and with grace – to move inside what space confines – and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
I’m more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they’re not. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
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. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain. A. S. Byatt Read Quote
