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
past forget easy
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
accused understood knows
I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.
life mistake civilization
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
life cynical one-day
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
heart language exploding
Language is what stops the heart exploding.
children broken triumph
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.
loss glasses gains
I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.
elude-us trying stories
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
book writing left
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
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.