"

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

"

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

"

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

"

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

"

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the...more

"

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

"

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy...more

"

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck o...more

"

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

"

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under it...more

"

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

"

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesit...more

"

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irr...more

"

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

"

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfam...more