Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

The only selfish life is a timid one.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.