Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

I like passion, I like to be among the desperate.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I'm warm.

My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.

There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. I don't think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder

I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.

Hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex.

what the church calls love is actually psychosis and (...) what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's.

Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.

There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.

Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.

What is desire? Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watching you eat. Desire is pouring wine for you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin. Look - in between us now are the props of ordinary life - glasses, knives, cloths, Time has been here before. History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. The props change, but not this. Not this single naked wanting you.

The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil?

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.

St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human.

You can change everything about yourself - your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history - but you can't change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.