Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.

Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.

The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.

Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.

Even the creative things feel mathematic, almost.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.

I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination.

In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Music and dance are all you need.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

When I do plays in New York and do eight shows a week, you have the same feeling. Three of them are terrible, four of them are okay and one is really good. It's hard to say what accounts for the really good one or for the terrible ones, but you end up trying to remanufacture whatever worked for the good one, like eating a tomato. I ate a tomato and the show was good, but that of course is not how it works.

Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

In order to have that incredible groove that makes you dream you have to think not of the groove, but of the dream.

Dancing is being trusted with other people's guts; choreographing is trusting other people with yours. When I choreograph I'm giving a dancer something to do and trusting the dancer to do it and build on it.

Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.

I was once walking in an airport and a woman came up to me and said, 'Be zany!'. That'd be like walking up to Baryshikov and going, 'Plie! Just do a plie! Do it! Do a releve right now! Lift my wife!'

I have no desire to prove anything by my work. I have never used it as an outlet or as a means of expressing myself. I just dance.

Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.

When I discovered dancing, I learned to dream.