Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

What you risk reveals what you value.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.