“I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my g...” — A. S. Byatt Quote

“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.”

“I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.”

“You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.”

“I'm not a writer. As for direction, I don't have the guts to do that. Still you can never say never.”

“I did this book 'Harvest for Hope,' and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.”

“I want to say things on stage that I wouldn't have the guts to say in conversation.”