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
Jeanette Winterson quotes about
blind effort few kidding less manage manages mostly nature people
Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
british-novelist
You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
cameron chance david prepared though
I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either. I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory.
british-novelist incredibly tests work
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
dog falling-in-love book
Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.
meaningful book kids
We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.
cheating hands infidelity
Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
lonely drama acceptance
I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too – sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person.
want what-you-want
It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.
numbness waiting leaving
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
ambition literature huge
I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.
hands world care
In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.
crush book reading
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
drawing space desire
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.