Quote

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
Make
Handle
Life
Maybe
Choices
Truth
Might
Inventing
Human
Hostile
Humans
Islands
Done
Torture

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.'
Jeanette Winterson
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I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
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If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.
Jeanette Winterson
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[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson
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I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Jeanette Winterson
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In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening.
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Why is the measure of love loss?
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She was a monster, but she was my monster.
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It's great to win a few prizes early on. It helps a writer to get noticed and to get some sales. It can also be a pain in the arse because it gets in the way of the quiet, contemplative time every writer needs, but which is particularly important when you are a new writer finding your own voice, and pursuing the things that interest you.
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Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
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When 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 Winterson
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How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
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There are so many separate selves no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
Jeanette Winterson
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Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
Jeanette Winterson
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Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.
Jeanette Winterson
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Tell me the story, Pew. . . . It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. Who's she? That's another story.
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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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What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
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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
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I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.
Jeanette Winterson