Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

I had been agitating for a pet for some time. In my head I had a white rabbit called Ezra who bit people who ignored me. Ezra's pelt was as white as the soul in heaven but his heart was black...

I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved.

At present, computers are spectacular at number crunching and data processing. We can code programmes that feel as though computers are interacting with us, and that's fun, but in fact they aren't interacting in a way that we expect a human being to interact. But what will happen when a programme that has self-developed, that has its own version of what we call consciousness - realises, in the human sense of the verb 'to realise', exactly what/who is on the other side of the screen?

In theory you are right... Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.

I felt miserable. When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt. But he was a poet.

Can I have some fish-bait?' I asked.

Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.

Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

I love you, he says. I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don't trust him.

He goes to the window, watches the buses up and down Oxford Road, carrying their cargo of people who aren't thinking about the future beyond teatime or tomorrow or their next holiday or whatever fear is the fear that waits for them in the dark. It's raining. That's what most people are thinking about. The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it through the gap under the door as it closes.

Your life flashes before you, flash, flash, because there's so little of it. I mean, what have you ever done that was worth doing?

They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.

El centro comercial no es nuestro verdadero hogar, ni un espacio público, aunque, a medida que desaparecen las librerías, los jardines, los parques, los museos y los polideportivos, la falsa amabilidad de los centros comerciales sea el único espacio que queda para muchos, aparte de las calles.

For a few moments we sat silent, then: 'So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.

I mean, if I am going to invest in a new model, I'd have to be sure there's a market. We will create a market, said Claire with surprising ruthlessness. That's how business works. That's how late capitalism works, I said.

Lo que arriesgas revela cuánto vales.

But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with fig leaves. It's a sin this not being ready, this not being up to it.

It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

With faith, all things are possible.

I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.

Dark woke out of his sleeping nightmare and into his waking nightmare. He had dreamed of a door closing and closing.

There's a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It's AI.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

The fight against fascism had been won, but it was the fight against communism that really motivated Britain and America. The world's great capitalist democracies were not interested in any ideology except the rights of markets.