Quote

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

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
Emotion
Trouble
Causes
Cliches
Cliche
Seeks
Precise
Cause
Expression

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Image
When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
Jeanette Winterson
Image
I don't believe in happy endings.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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 Winterson
Image
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.
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
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
Image
A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.
Jeanette Winterson