Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.

She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.

He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

Babies are frightening -- raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.

The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.

love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.

We walked in silence. Nature can cancel thought. We needed to walk and there was nothing more to say.

When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floot is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. I started to cry.

You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

We always think the thing we need to transform everything - the miracle - is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.

And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.

It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?