Jeanette Winterson

What you risk reveals what you value.

I don’t believe in happy endings.

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

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?

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn’t felt that.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight’s not on them. But they do get somewhere.

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn’t matter to me.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you’ll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

Confidence and superiority: It’s the usual fundamentalist stuff: I’ve got the truth, and you haven’t.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

I don’t read reviews because by then it’s too late – whatever anyone says, the book won’t change. It is written.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

I’m not a quitter.

I don’t understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it’s a mind-altering possibility.

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.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years’ experience can accomplish a lot, but it can’t access the hidden places.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

What’s invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn’t choosing; I didn’t think I had to.

Naked is the best disguise.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

I didn’t mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it’s unlikely you’ll stay that sure of yourself.

With animal behavior, they’re all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

I never cared about money.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

I never wanted children. If I’d been deeply in love with a man and he’d wanted children, it would have been difficult.

I don’t write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image – not necessarily connected.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.

Many people feel their outer self isn’t the whole self.

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.