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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.

Jeanette Winterson

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

Jeanette Winterson

They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

Jeanette Winterson

I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an al...

Jeanette Winterson

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

Jeanette Winterson

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who cou...

Jeanette Winterson

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Jeanette Winterson

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so ...

Jeanette Winterson

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

Jeanette Winterson

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape ...

Jeanette Winterson

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Jeanette Winterson

My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . .

Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Jeanette Winterson

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

Jeanette Winterson

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

Jeanette Winterson

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

Jeanette Winterson

Naked is the best disguise.

Jeanette Winterson

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

Jeanette Winterson

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.

Jeanette Winterson

They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

Jeanette Winterson

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

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