Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation.

I reassured myself as best I could. The minister was a man, but he wore a skirt, so that made him special. There must be others, but were there enough? That was the worry. There were a lot of women, and most of them got married. If they couldn't marry each other, and I didn't think they could, because of having babies, some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts.

I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.

Yet I wish I had a cat.

I tried not to marry you because neither of us have a happy-ever-after story written inside us.

I am busy with the Lord in Wigan

I can't stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there'll be another war. I thought he'd end wars for ever, that's what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there'll be peace and it's always been one more. I want to stop now.

The moment has been waiting the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker.

If there is such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

The arts aren't a leisure industry - the arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality -a series of inventions and creations. A capacity to think differently, a willingness to change our understanding of ourselves. To help us be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people.

Zina iÅŸlediÄŸimi biliyordum çünkü sevdiÄŸim ÅŸey evimin d???ndayd?.

Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.

answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

It is snowing. In the English language we do not know anything about the 'it' that is snowing. It might be God. Maybe not. Anyway. It. Is. Snowing.

Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets.

I began to feel like Sarpi, that Venetian priest and diplomat, who said he never told a lie but didn't tell the truth to everyone.

and what is memory but a rope slung across time?

I have a theory that every time you make an important decision, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

So light a candle to the dead. And light a candle to miracles, however unlikely, and pray that you recognise yours. And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much. And light a candle to the future; that it may happen and not be swallowed up by darkness. And light a candle to love.

Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. I'm surprised at myself talking in this way.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

Memories can be tools for change; they don't have to be weapons used against us, or baggage we have to drag around.