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.
british-novelist incredibly tests work
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
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.
being-yourself loneliness knowing
Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.
lovers self-fulfilling-prophecy
As your lover describes you, so you are.
light-years space blue
Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.
accused understood knows
I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.
time going-away hours
When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.
time lasts speak
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
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.
missionary want orlando
Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.
fairy-stories names magic
Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.
loving-someone wake-up chance
There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.