Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

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

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

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

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

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

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

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

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

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

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

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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