Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

The writing process is sort of like when you've got no electricity and you've gotten up in the middle of the night to find the bathroom, feeling your way along in the dark. I can't hardly tell you what I do because I really don't know.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

Janie blinks and leans against the wall, just in case. But it's no one's dream. It's just the end of some things. And the beginning of others.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.

My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won't do what you've done before.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

Even places that have been shrouded in darkness for billions of years can be illuminated. Even a stone from the bottom of a river can be used to produce fire. Our present sufferings, no matter how dark, have certainly not continued for billions of years--nor will they linger forever. The sun will definitely rise. In fact, its ascent has already begun.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.

I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.

Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.

With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.