Jeanette Winterson

“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”

“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.”

“I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.”

“Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.”

“I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life...”

“I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like...”

“There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.”

“St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.”

“I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested...”

“And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.”

“She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.”

“She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.”

“The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ou...”

“What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?”

“Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.”

“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thin...”

“Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn't been violated.”

“If haunting is anything, perhaps that's what it is; time in the wrong place.”

“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time a...”