Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

- Jeanette Winterson

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

- Jeanette Winterson

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

- Jeanette Winterson

I don't believe in happy endings.

- 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

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

- Jeanette Winterson

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

- Jeanette Winterson

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

- Jeanette Winterson

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?

- 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 don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

- Jeanette Winterson

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

- Jeanette Winterson

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

- Jeanette Winterson

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

- 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

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

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.

- Jeanette Winterson

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

- Jeanette Winterson

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

- Jeanette Winterson

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.

- Jeanette Winterson

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

- Jeanette Winterson

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

- Jeanette Winterson

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

- Jeanette Winterson

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

- Jeanette Winterson

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

- Jeanette Winterson

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

- Jeanette Winterson

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

- Jeanette Winterson

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

- Jeanette Winterson

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?

- 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

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

- Jeanette Winterson

I never cared about money.

- Jeanette Winterson

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

- Jeanette Winterson

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

- Jeanette Winterson

What you risk reveals what you value.

- Jeanette Winterson

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

- Jeanette Winterson

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

- Jeanette Winterson

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

- Jeanette Winterson

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

- Jeanette Winterson

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

- 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

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

- Jeanette Winterson

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

- Jeanette Winterson

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

- Jeanette Winterson

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

- Jeanette Winterson

I'm not a quitter.

- Jeanette Winterson

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

- Jeanette Winterson

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

- Jeanette Winterson

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

- Jeanette Winterson

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.

- Jeanette Winterson

Naked is the best disguise.

- 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 write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

- Jeanette Winterson

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

- 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

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

- 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

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

- Jeanette Winterson

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.

- Jeanette Winterson

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

- Jeanette Winterson

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

- Jeanette Winterson

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

- Jeanette Winterson