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
nature decision principles
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
hero people causes
If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.
believe ambition thinking
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
writing fables break
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
lasts ifs
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
people where-you-live london
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
self people feels
Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
dream believe shapes
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.
art jobs book
Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.
reading wild-things
Reading is where the wild things are.
purpose void routine
It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.
fall heart fighting
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
hurt book successful
It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn't otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn't change. It doesn't change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.
land birth infant
Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.