Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

I don't believe in happy endings.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

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

I'm not a quitter.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

What you risk reveals what you value.

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

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

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

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

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

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

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

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

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

I never cared about money.

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

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

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