Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
Jeanette WintersonI don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
Jeanette WintersonAlthough wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
Jeanette WintersonThe impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.
Jeanette WintersonI say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
Jeanette WintersonI cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love
Jeanette WintersonAutobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
Jeanette WintersonWe bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
Jeanette WintersonI think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
Jeanette WintersonI know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
Jeanette WintersonWhen I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Jeanette WintersonThe crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that.
Jeanette WintersonOne day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.
Jeanette Wintersonunhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.
Jeanette WintersonTo create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
Jeanette WintersonPart fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
Jeanette WintersonHe doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.
Jeanette WintersonDon't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?
Jeanette WintersonWhat I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spread the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.
Jeanette WintersonI know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
Jeanette WintersonThe key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.
Jeanette WintersonLovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.
Jeanette WintersonLove, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.
Jeanette WintersonI 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 in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state. [Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.
Jeanette WintersonSome people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.
Jeanette WintersonMyths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.
Jeanette WintersonTurn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Jeanette WintersonI want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
Jeanette WintersonI spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
Jeanette WintersonLong 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 WintersonI don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.
Jeanette WintersonYou said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?
Jeanette Winterson