Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.

There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take is seriously.

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.

And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued…

I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn't it better for me to live a half life for her sake?

Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair blazing and you are saying, Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself.

I am an ambitious writer – I don't see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.

When I touch her, my fingers don't question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.

Bridges join but they also separate.

And if you have found your voice, you can be heard

I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

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

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.