Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I love making up titles.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

Literature invents its own rules.

My books aren't autobiographical.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.