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
heart language exploding
Language is what stops the heart exploding.
children broken triumph
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.
loss glasses gains
I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.
elude-us trying stories
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
book writing left
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
nature decision principles
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
hero people causes
If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.
believe ambition thinking
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
writing fables break
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
lasts ifs
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
people where-you-live london
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
self people feels
Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
dream believe shapes
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.
art jobs book
Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.