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
keys tolerance key-to-happiness
The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.
dream pain
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.
reading soul rendezvous
Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.
thinking mind matter
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?
cutting hands insanity
Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
wall fall should
It is the nature of walls that they should fall.
homosexual rhinoceros
A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.
sex love-is world
What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
roots space stories
When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.
reading world dialogue
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
creativity mad trying
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
thinking rivers people
The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?
way historian
We are all historians in our small way.
writing cutting thinking
I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.