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The only selfish life is a timid one.

Jeanette Winterson

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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

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To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
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She was a monster, but she was my monster.
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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.
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Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
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Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
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Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.
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Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
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In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
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There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.
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Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
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Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better.
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Autobiography 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.
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Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
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I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
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Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.
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Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.
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As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
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It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
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We 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.
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We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.
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