A. S. BYATT

Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

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.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

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 think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

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

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

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.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.