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
family silence unhappy
unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.
death children yesterday
Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?
determined quantum every-second
This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.
character spotlight
My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
love war passion
Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.
england elizabethan
We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.
writing discipline creative
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
believe men thinking
I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.
rumor legends nobody-knows
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
giving hard-life enough
Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.
inspirational children kids
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
mother art thinking
Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.
Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.
lying believe borders
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.