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
powerful writing soul
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.
thinking miracle matter
It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.
lying years simplicity
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.
pain mouths creatures
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
different goes-on literature
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
mother art thinking
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. 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.
people misery miserable
Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
ordinary shapes accepting
I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.
heart may finals
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
regret excess denial
I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.
real book thinking
When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.
writing fiction stories
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
character confusion literature
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
second-chance remember moments
It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.