A. S. Byatt

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

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.

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.

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.

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