Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

The Future is Now. That annoys me because if the future is now, where is the present?

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?

Why was money worth everything when you had none of it, and nothing when you had too much?

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood -- a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.

Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.

Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

I asked my mother why we couldn't have books and she said, 'The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.' I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

I have had a lot to put up with, she said, looking meaningfully at me. I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

And then I was offered the job of a particle in factory physics. I was offered the job of an electron in an office atom. I was offered the job of a frequency for a radio station. People told me I could easily make it as a ray in a ray gun. What's the matter with you, don't you want to do well? I wanted to be a beach bum and work on my wave function. I have always loved the sea.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions?

I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved

Energy cannot be lost, only transformed; where do the words go?

I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn't I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be