Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

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.

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

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Naked is the best disguise.

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