Jeanette Winterson Quotes (82 Quotes)

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there Wallowing is sex for depressives.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

We are friends and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.

I never cared about money.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

The secret of the world is this the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star rather it will guide you to where you want to go. It's a reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to cease from exploration and know the place for the first time.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

What you risk reveals what you value.

I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush agains teach other.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

I'm not a quitter.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tel.

I don't believe in happy endings.

I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either. I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory.

Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of s.

Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple lines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem. But not one I chose to deal with for many years more. The problem there and then was what was going to happen to me. The Victoria Hospital was big and frightening, and I couldn't even sing to any effect because I couldn't hear what I was singing. There was nothing to read except some dental notices and an instruction leaflet for the X-ray machine. I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when I stood up I didn't have an Eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions you get involved.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.