Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson, OBEis 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 August 1959
powerful matter literature
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
literature dies our-lives
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
heart perfect holy-grail
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
truth thinking heterosexuality-is
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
change book literature
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
book literature rogues
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
love book body
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
want matter cosmos
Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
writing self literature
There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
love hurt self
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
fun winning humanness-is
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
tragedy stories ends
Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.
mother heart passion
St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry. She wanted to be a nun. She hoped I would be a priest and saved to give me an education while my friends plaited rope and trailed after the plough. I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.
children growing-up lying
We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.