Jeanette Winterson

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.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

What the myths say, is that you have to be the hero of your own life. You're the one who has to take charge of who you are, you're the one who has to take control. And also, you're the one who can bring something to the community.

What you eat is the most political thing you do every day

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.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

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?

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.