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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
invisible well-being wells
What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
wherever-you-are fronts
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
language hiding hiding-place
Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
lovers self-fulfilling-prophecy
As your lover describes you, so you are.
risk risk-it luminous
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.