Top 30 Jeanette Winterson Quotes

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

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

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.

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

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it’s unlikely you’ll stay that sure of yourself.

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

I don’t believe in happy endings.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I’m not a quitter.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

What you risk reveals what you value.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

I didn’t mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn’t choosing; I didn’t think I had to.

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

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

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I never wanted children. If I’d been deeply in love with a man and he’d wanted children, it would have been difficult.