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
healing reality light
I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.
dream angel wings
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
creativity talking voice
I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way.
suicide trying together
I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
heart passion kissing
To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
justice measurement accounts
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.
emotional
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
body remember states
We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
august want shade
August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.
hands sun heat
In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun.
meaningful pursuit-of-happiness happy-times
If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
dog dragons knives
Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.
kind standing-out figures
I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.
giving-up demon found
If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.