Jeanette Winterson

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

“I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.”

“Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.”

“Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.”

“I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.”

“I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

“I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.”

“Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.”

“To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.”

“However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.”

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

“I'm not a quitter.”

“With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.”

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

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

“Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.”

“The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.”