Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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