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
lying years simplicity
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.
pain mouths creatures
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
different goes-on literature
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
mother art thinking
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. 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.
book reading eye
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
people misery miserable
Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
ordinary shapes accepting
I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.
heart may finals
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
real book thinking
When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.
writing fiction stories
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
character confusion literature
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
second-chance remember moments
It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.
believe life-is-too-short people
I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.
love powerful thinking
I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.