Jeanette Winterson Quotes
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Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
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I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
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I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The Sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day. (p. 197)
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However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.
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Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9
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I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.
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Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
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I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
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Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
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I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
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I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
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Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
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If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
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The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
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One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
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In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now.
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Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
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He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.
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I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
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To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
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I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
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It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. (p. 199)