Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

I'm not a quitter.

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

I don't believe in happy endings.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

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

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 don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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