Explore Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

What you risk reveals what you value.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

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 believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

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?

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

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

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.'