Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

I always look for characters that will hopefully develop into a more powerful symbol.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

The best way to bring people in and have them empathize with others is through storytelling.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.

Well - when I write my book, and tell the tale Of my adventures - all these little stars That shake out of my cloak - I must save those To use for asterisks.

I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.

So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

I feel that our stories are cross culturally irrelevant, and I'm a member if a larger community of people who have no boundaries in terms of color or in terms of how I look at other people and their stories.