Jeanette Winterson Quotes

As your lover describes you, so you are.

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

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.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable - we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books - not part of me, all of me - and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.