Jeanette Winterson Quotes
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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 believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
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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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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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Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
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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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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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I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
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Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9
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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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Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
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Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
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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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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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Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
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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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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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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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But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
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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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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
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I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.
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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)