To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“The line between life and death is a couple of inches at most. The width of a door that connects two rooms.” — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one.… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“How could I not go on talking to you? How could I not expect to see you when it's the end of… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror,… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“I am short, so I like the little guy/underdog stories, but they are not straightforwardly about one size versus another. Think about,… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.” — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us? — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons,… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
“What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up.… — Jeanette Winterson Copy Share Image
