Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.

My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things that people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right.

when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics. (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? p. 103)

It's so crude' complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshipers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn't quite sure what it was but she was sure it was important.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

All I am saying is that love is not exclusively human.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Well, I find it so.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."' That's from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

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.

I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.

Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.

There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewerage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. What more ? The hate, envy, malice, greed, stupidity and evil that lie under the floor of everything. If I have secrets so do you.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

Reality is water-soluble. What we could see, the rocks, the shore, the trees, the boats on the lake, had lost their usual definition and blurred into the long grey of a week's rain. Even the house, that we fancied was made of stone, wavered inside a heavy mist and through that mist, sometimes, a door or a window appeared like an image in a dream. Every solid thing had dissolved into its watery equivalent.

Mrs. Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.