A. S. Byatt Quotes

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

It is difficult to survive as an author in Sweden, so for commercial success, it is good idea to write crime, get yourself translated, and live happily ever after.

You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.

It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels. I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue.

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

A decade in advertising exposed me to plenty of schemers and backstabbers. But honestly, advertising is wonderful training for fiction. Writing novels is much easier if you've ever tried to write a billboard.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

Short fiction isn't my natural form. It's taken a lot of work over the years to finally feel more comfortable writing stories under 80,000 words!

I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.

My favourite authors are Jeffrey Archer, for his story telling skills; John Grisham, for the completely new genre he created; and James Patterson, for the way he created a new business model out of writing.

I was elated when I found out my first novel, 'Leaving Patrick,' about a woman who walks out on her husband, was going to be published.

'Badlapur' was my first film that did well, commercially. People have also watched the other films that I have made, but they didn't bring in the footfall.