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
mother book too-late
Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!
hurt walking-away rejection
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
book adventure sea
Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.
strong heart blue
I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
crazy book reflection
I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.
pain moving stories
There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.
love water neglect
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
fear passion laughing
We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.
mirrors saws firsts
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
writing self arrogant
Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.
book doors magic
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
believe book long
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
wherever-you-are fronts
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
art hero want
I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.