Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British writer Jeanette Winterson.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
Jeanette Winterson is an English writer. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She holds an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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.
I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.
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?
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
I don't believe in happy endings.
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.
There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
Naked is the best disguise.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
What you risk reveals what you value.
I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.
I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.
I never cared about money.
My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
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.
I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.