Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

I don't particularly like messages, because everybody takes whatever they take from whatever.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe to hear, what you hear, what you want to understand, what you think you understand, what you understand...They are ten possibilities that we might have some problem communicating. But let's try anyway...

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

We always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want and not as they are.

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.

I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

There are many levels of truth.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Everybody in this public arena makes statements and gets interpreted different ways.

Life's all about perceptions.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

I don't think you really can send an exact message, because any two viewers are so disparate, in terms of their backgrounds, their point of view, their histories, that there's no telling what that message might be.