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
political world duty
I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.
guarantees boat conviction
She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.
art real rebellion
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.
war courage-to-love ifs
If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.
hero this-life
In this life, you have to be your own hero.
hero names matter
It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?
children blow talking
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.
mother book fall
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
risk risk-it luminous
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
love-you rocks long
You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.
art lying autobiography
There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies
past moments enough
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough
art growing-up book
There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change.
art children mean
What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.