Top 35 Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

I’m not a quitter.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 don’t read reviews because by then it’s too late – whatever anyone says, the book won‘t change. It is written.

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

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

What you risk reveals what you value.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

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

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

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

I never cared about money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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