Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

I was always writing. When I was a little kid, before I learned how to write, I would tell stories. But as soon I as capable, I started writing. I filled notebooks and notebooks until I got my first computer when I was 11. It never really occurred to me that I would do anything else.

I have stacks and stacks of journals. I'll change the names if I ever decide to publish them.

I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I write the books to amuse myself.

I write mostly for pleasure, and the reading should ideally be for pleasure, too.

I've always wanted to be a writer, and I've kept journals since I was eight years old.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.