Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

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.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

Do it from the heart or not at all.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

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

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people.

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

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

Life was a pre-death experience.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.