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
poet satisfied
The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.
stars book moon
At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.
girl carbon advantage
Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
thinking world form
I think we are worlds compressed into human form.
inward body belief
The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.
wings fans shoulders
Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.
broken matter boxes
I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.
lying home night
When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.
keys tolerance key-to-happiness
The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.
dream pain
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.
reading soul rendezvous
Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.
thinking mind matter
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?
cutting hands insanity
Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
wall fall should
It is the nature of walls that they should fall.