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
stars light long
What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.
thinking men free-man
The free man never thinks of escape.
loss grieving love-loss
Why is the measure of love loss?
voice heard
There are voices and they must be heard.
thinking cells blood
Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
world language poet
…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.
falling-in-love firsts logical
Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.
struggle stories ends
I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.
findings humiliating objects
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
reading want facts
I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
peculiar capacity form
Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.
invisible familiar objects
Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.
lines take-me walks
Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.
real believe writing
Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.