Quote

The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.

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
Gave
Boys
Injunction
Education
Referring
Idea
Knees
Mother
Seemed
Ideas
Meant
Ever
Touch
Never
Sex

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We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.
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I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.
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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?
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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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The only selfish life is a timid one.
Jeanette Winterson
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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
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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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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.
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Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
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What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?
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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.
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I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
Jeanette Winterson
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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
Jeanette Winterson
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Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Jeanette Winterson
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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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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
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To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.
Jeanette Winterson
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It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?
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There are so many separate selves no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
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Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you'll be able to transform your lead into gold. I have that rather magical sense about books - that they do, somehow, have special powers.
Jeanette Winterson