Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I've always been that way, and I've always written stuff down.

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

Every now and then, I feel terribly uncomfortable with what I'm working on, and then I think maybe I am an artist. I'm not very articulate about it, but I do know that you have to follow your gut.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Sometimes I feel like I float in and out of different personalities.

I don't think you can be taught how to make art. You can be coached, but on a fundamental level you have to figure it out for yourself. You have to learn how your own mind works, figure out your own relationship to the art; you essentially have to invent it completely for yourself.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

As an artist, there's so many categories that you're put into, that there are so many things that I'm about that I've never explored as an artist on film. I don't see myself in so many characters in film.

Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

We are all several different people. There are different aspects of our nature that are competing.

I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist's psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.

I still haven't made a film that defines who I am.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.

Sometimes the writing leads to the revelations, not the other way around.

By the time I hit college, my secret shame was the reason I was an actor was my own words sort of dried up. I stopped writing. I stopped being able to form my own vision. That's actually what my first feature is about - looking back at two different selves.