"It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve...












Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
More Jeanette Winterson quotes
"Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading...
"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 riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new ...
"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.
"your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now yo...
"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)
"Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physic...
"Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it...
"The words come at my call but who calls whom?
"But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
"And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That...