Jeanette Winterson

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

“The words come at my call but who calls whom?”

“Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.”

“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”

“Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.”

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation....When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities.”

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

“The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.”

“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.”

“Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.”

“Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.”

“Be with someone you don't want to be without.”

“I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff”

“You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.”

“Why is the measure of love loss?”

“Naked is the best disguise.”

“Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.”