"Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
~ Jeanette Winterson ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
More Jeanette Winterson quotes
"It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So...
"I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that wri...
"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.
"Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
"I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British wr...
"He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
"To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is ha...
"It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in o...
"In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people...
"I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are ...
"That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape throu...
"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
"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.
"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. I...