Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
Jeanette WintersonThe most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.
Jeanette WintersonI drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl.
Jeanette WintersonWhen people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.
Jeanette Winterson