Jeanette Winterson

“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.”

“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.”

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

“Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”

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

“My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.”

“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?”

“When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”

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

“What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?”

“I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.”

“Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.”

“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

“You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.”

“Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?”

“Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.”

“I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.”

“To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.”

“History is a madman's museum.”

“I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.”