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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.
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
Done
Torture
Make
Handle
Life
Maybe
Choices
Truth
Might
Inventing
Human
Hostile
Humans
Islands
More quotes by Jeanette Winterson
Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.
Jeanette Winterson
Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.
Jeanette Winterson
I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.
Jeanette Winterson
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Jeanette Winterson
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
Jeanette Winterson
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
Jeanette Winterson
the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.
Jeanette Winterson
He: What’s the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, but there was nothing the matter with her.
Jeanette Winterson
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
Jeanette Winterson
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?
Jeanette Winterson
I believe in communication books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
Jeanette Winterson
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
Jeanette Winterson
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Jeanette Winterson
I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people.
Jeanette Winterson
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
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.
Jeanette Winterson
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
Jeanette Winterson
