JEANETTE WINTERSON

What you risk reveals what you value.

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.