Jeanette Winterson's Quotes

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

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

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.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.

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.

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?

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

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

What you risk reveals what you value.

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

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

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

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

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

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

Naked is the best disguise.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.