-
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)
Jeanette Winterson -
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
Jeanette Winterson
-
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
Jeanette Winterson -
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
Jeanette Winterson -
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.
Jeanette Winterson -
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.
Jeanette Winterson -
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
Jeanette Winterson -
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
Jeanette Winterson
-
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
Jeanette Winterson -
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
Jeanette Winterson -
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.
Jeanette Winterson -
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
Jeanette Winterson -
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
Jeanette Winterson -
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
Jeanette Winterson
-
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
Jeanette Winterson -
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Jeanette Winterson -
Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
Jeanette Winterson -
He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.
Jeanette Winterson -
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
Jeanette Winterson -
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
Jeanette Winterson
-
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
Jeanette Winterson -
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
Jeanette Winterson -
But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
Jeanette Winterson -
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
Jeanette Winterson