Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Naked is the best disguise.

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

What you risk reveals what you value.

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

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

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

I'm not a quitter.

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

I don't believe in happy endings.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?