Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Everyone asks me how I get my subjects to open up to me. There’s no formula to it. It’s just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people - of being yourself.

People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

Cynthia's lyrics always expressed the feelings people felt but they couldn't express themselves.

I just want people to hear me and my story.

I came from battling, knowing about the lyrics. All that's cool, but if you want people to love you, you have to talk to them about what they go through.

If you show you're human and have something to say, people will connect with you.

I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.

I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn't realize they thought. And they say, 'Hey, yeah!' And they like that.

It's when you're true to yourself that resonates with other people.

You have to believe that people don't want what you think they're going to like, you know? They want what you like. Once you start doing that, you actually start connecting with people.

I didn't think I was helping other people. But I think that comes hand in hand with trying to be able to connect with people, and if you make things too personal, then it's harder for people to relate to you. Otherwise, it's just them listening to you read your diary.

I realized that there's this fine line between being personal and being general and being alienating.

I feel like the more I share, the more relatable I am.

I suppose my job is to describe spaces that are honest to me. And the goal, I suppose, is that the listener can hear themselves in some way in that song and also, in some way, hear me. And so if the listener is able to identify with my honesty then I'm being the most helpful I can possibly be.

I try to make the kinds of things I want to see out there in the world, and hope they end up resonating with other people too.

I don't want to bore people with things that don't matter to them. I want to share parts of my life that are universally true with other people.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

I'm not a gifted storyteller, so I write what I know and hope that honesty resonates with other people's experiences.

I think I was able to talk to people about values in ways that people - in ways that resonated with folks.

People don't walk around thinking of themselves as bad people. You're part of the environment that you grow up in, and there can be decency in that. I always try to find a little glimmer of that, in anything that I do, because you can find places where there's humor or lightness in something that's deep and profound, and that tends to resonate more and make people more human. As an actor and performer, I think it resonates more with the audience when you do have the payoff.

When people get to speak about themselves and the things that matter to them, on their own terms, we see them as who they are. They can't be reduced to objects of derision.

Learn to express rather than impress. Expressing evokes a 'me too' attitude while impressing evokes a 'so what' attitude

It was a such a surprise, such an absolute shocking surprise to me to not know what you're doing and to find out that this thing that you don't even know how to do, that you're sure you don't know how to do, speaks to so many people and touches so many people in some way.