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

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves. If you start taking books off shelv...

Jeanette Winterson

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy c...

Jeanette Winterson

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Jeanette Winterson

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 writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized pe...

Jeanette Winterson

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

Jeanette Winterson

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

Jeanette Winterson

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.

Jeanette Winterson

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 the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Jeanette Winterson

Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a ...

Jeanette Winterson

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

Jeanette Winterson

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

Jeanette Winterson

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

Jeanette Winterson

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Jeanette Winterson

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Jeanette Winterson

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 writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Jeanette Winterson

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Jeanette Winterson

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

Jeanette Winterson

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want...

Jeanette Winterson

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 you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.

Jeanette Winterson

... the nearness of the wound to the gift,

Jeanette Winterson

Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver... History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so do...

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