Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Literature
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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
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With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
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Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.
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Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
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My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
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They say that 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?
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I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.
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London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
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Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
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I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
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I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
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Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
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I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
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You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
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That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
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I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
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What you risk reveals what you value.
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I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
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I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.
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I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
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I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.
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Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
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I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
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Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.
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In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
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Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
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One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
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I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
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We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
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