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
regret children soon-enough
Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
kind standing-out figures
I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.
finals emotion
No emotion is the final one.
love-is way stories
This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.
heart two splits
Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.
selfish life-is
The only selfish life is a timid one.
two people rope
I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.
lying mirrors blood
You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden these words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
grief past greater
There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.
writing thinking years
I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.
selfish grief tears
Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?
adventure thinking hands
Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?
strong lying fate
The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable...
believe winning past
i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new.