Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of...

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imaginat...

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

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

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

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it i...

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time....

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity...

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is tru...

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the ...

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets wou...

Be with someone you don't want to be without.

It's true that heroes are inspiring but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy...

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of ...

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the s...

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, i...

The journey is about coming home....There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. I...

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the in...

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own fa...

Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through ...

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame hea...

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happe...

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TI...

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you ...

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up m...

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could ...

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenber...

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear...

Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resol...

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like...

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.

The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm an...

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if re...

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close...

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle....

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a ...

One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wonde...

you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do ...

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness...

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jea...

What you think is the heart might well be another organ.

Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t ...

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

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t...

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of...

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed...

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together t...

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the...

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out o...

To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly ...

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I...

Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not...

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation...

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little m...

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates...

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself an...

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I ge...

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The small...

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest femal...

Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we nee...

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me...

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible...

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated fr...

Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost?...

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – ...

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuou...

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote t...

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating th...

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now...

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to st...

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is...

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, k...

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity o...

He: What’s the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly n...

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the wor...

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wai...

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wai...

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of...

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear b...

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.