I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
From 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.
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
6 perspectives
5 perspectives
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives