Jeanette Winterson Quotes

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

It's the irrational things that interest me.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

We value feeling over knowing, because you can't prove something that hasn't been done before.

There is no greater monster than reason.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track.

I'm not someone who calculates things.

To me, unconventional thinking is approaching a problem and asking, 'Why not? Why can't something be done?' If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

Counterintuitive actions prove we can trust real knowledge and do the opposite of what we feel makes sense.

With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

You have to be willing to ask questions that almost no one else would ask.

Caltech is a very adventurous place. Part of the culture is that we tolerate people doing things that seem impossible, and also synthesizing and borrowing ideas across very kooky and unusual boundaries.

By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to change it.

Please don't be deterred in the fanatic application of your sterile logic.

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

The most successful people in the world are the ones who thought of that idea that was 'too crazy to work.'

When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.