Jeanette Winterson Quotes
-
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
-
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.
-
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
-
I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.
-
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.
-
Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9
-
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
-
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
-
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
-
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
-
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
-
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
-
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
-
But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
-
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
-
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
-
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.
-
It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. (p. 199)
-
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
-
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.
-
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
-
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
-
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
-
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.