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
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.
passion first-love lust
Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals
glasses air water
In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
space madness one-thing
It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
journey sea water
I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.
heart home night
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 to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.
stars broken rooms
I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?
sea voyages faces
…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.
player today passing
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.
regret mistake errors
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
height depth strange
I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.