Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

About Jeanette Winterson:

Jeanette Winterson is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.
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Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we...

Jeanette Winterson

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 harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and ...

Jeanette Winterson

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 physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also ...

Jeanette Winterson

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.

Jeanette Winterson

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimm...

Jeanette Winterson

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

Jeanette Winterson

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

Jeanette Winterson

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

Jeanette Winterson

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Jeanette Winterson

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlie...

Jeanette Winterson

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

Jeanette Winterson

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

Jeanette Winterson

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Jeanette Winterson

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me. Jordan... I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I cou...

Jeanette Winterson

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

Jeanette Winterson

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

Jeanette Winterson

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, eve...

Jeanette Winterson

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow ...

Jeanette Winterson

Credeam ca vrea sa calatoreasca, dar imi spune adevaruri pe care le stiu deja, ca nu e nevoie sa plece de pe insula ca sa vada lumea, ca are destule mari si orase in minte. Daca e asa, daca toti le avem, atunci poate ca lumea aceasta, luna si stelele...

Jeanette Winterson

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

Jeanette Winterson

Author Bio

  • NameJeanette Winterson
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • BornAugust 27, 1959
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Novelist; Journalist
  • WorksOranges Are Not The Only Fruit
  • AwardsOfficer Of The Order Of The British Empire; John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Lambda Literary Award