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
reality medicine imagination
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
believe book communication
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
writing goes-on
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
ambition literature huge
I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.
risk literature take-a-chance
What you risk reveals what you value.
heart islands matter
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
christian believe gay
You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.
voice listening knack
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
powerful literature language
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
morning flower night
What kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.
funny uplifting running
When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.
lying want language
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
art luxury people
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
kids journey self
When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey...