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
moving past serial-killer
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
years cells body
You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.
lying night long
Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.
lying dark narrative
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
years leaving another-chance
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
home literature might
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
strong love-is forever
I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
being-yourself loneliness knowing
Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.
writing two kind
...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.
inspirational world breakdown
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
new-experiences people dull
As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.
alive half term
There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
love future mean
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
want what-you-want
It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.