Jeanette Winterson
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.Collection: Love
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.Collection: Pet
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.Collection: Communication
Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.Collection: Marriage
Naked is the best disguise.
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
What you risk reveals what you value.
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
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.
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
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?
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
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.
I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
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.
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
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.
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
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 never cared about money.
I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.