I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
A. S. ByattThat is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. ByattNarration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. ByattCoherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
A. S. Byatt