Explore Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Trust your creativity.

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.

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change.

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.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

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

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

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

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.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

Only the impossible is worth the effort.