I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldnโt be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language โ and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers โ a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isnโt a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette WintersonWe heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Jeanette WintersonTo create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
Jeanette WintersonThe 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