Jeanette Winterson

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

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

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

What you risk reveals what you value.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

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

Language always betrays us tells the truth when we want to lie and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Moss that is concentrating on being green.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

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.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.

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

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

No second chances at a single moment.

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

Birth is a shipwreck the mewling infant shored on unknown land.

Slightest accidents open up new worlds.

I don't believe in happy endings.

Curiosity is a feeling which causes us not to be content with the beauty and fragrance of the flower, but which prompts us to look under the rose.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well being.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

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

In the heat of her hands I thought This is the campfire that mocks the sun.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

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

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

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

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Naked is the best disguise.

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

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

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

A creative person is someone who imagines what other people cannot. Their value to us lies in expanding our own possibilities. Walls fall. We break out.

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

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

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

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

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

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

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

I never cared about money.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

A bridge is a meeting place. a possibility a metaphor

I'm not a quitter.

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.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

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

Gambling is not a vice it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table some do not. You play you win you play you lose. You play.

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.

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

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.

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

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

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?

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

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

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

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

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

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

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.