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
community mind important
I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
sex writing important
I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.
taken important safe
I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.
important-choices theory left-behind
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
british-novelist incredibly tests work
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
beside half mind miss paper pass reading serious washing
We are friends and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.
cameron chance david prepared though
I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either. I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory.
account goes happened happening
What happened to her, what goes on happening to her, does not account for her work.
blind effort few kidding less manage manages mostly nature people
Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
british-novelist
You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
memories world looks
Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.
taken journey path
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
honesty children mean
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.
clever stupid hero
In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.