Quote

The only selfish life is a timid one.

Jeanette Winterson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jeanette Winterson
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: August 27
Author
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Manchester
England
Timid
Selfish
Life

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Image
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Trust me, I'm telling you stories.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?
Jeanette Winterson
Image
You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
You 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
Image
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value you don't have to go along with any of this you can think for yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Myths 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 Winterson
Image
The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Some 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 Winterson
Image
As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
Jeanette Winterson