I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy. Jeanette Winterson More Quotes by Jeanette Winterson More Quotes From Jeanette Winterson As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself. Jeanette Winterson prepared vulnerable people I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel. Jeanette Winterson hero want art I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it. Jeanette Winterson huge ambition literature I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way. Jeanette Winterson creativity voice talking You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening. Jeanette Winterson gay christian believe I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world. Jeanette Winterson reading book moving I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can. Jeanette Winterson life-is-too-short believe people When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books. Jeanette Winterson real book thinking Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. Jeanette Winterson creative lying years It's great to win a few prizes early on. It helps a writer to get noticed and to get some sales. It can also be a pain in the arse because it gets in the way of the quiet, contemplative time every writer needs, but which is particularly important when you are a new writer finding your own voice, and pursuing the things that interest you. Jeanette Winterson pain voice winning We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me. Jeanette Winterson lasts book fall Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it. Jeanette Winterson different journey book Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality. Jeanette Winterson political passing-on spiritual The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them. Jeanette Winterson writing way thinking You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not. Jeanette Winterson cells body years People being encouraged to make up their own minds and think for themselves is so important. This world talks endlessly about freedom of choice, but we've never been [nothing] more than a nation of robots. Everybody is seduced by corporate culture. Jeanette Winterson choices people thinking We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that. Jeanette Winterson bridges book people When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. Jeanette Winterson library mind culture It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes. Jeanette Winterson important character fiction We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated. Jeanette Winterson mind culture book
