A. S. Byatt Quotes

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.

I grew up reading a lot on literature and all of that.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

All literature is gossip.

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.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I'm told I am over-choosy, and I shocked everybody by doing Jeffrey Archer. I did that to annoy everybody; sometimes, between Medea and Virginia Woolf, you can get punch-drunk.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.