Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

I think everybody wants to connect. There is nothing worse than feeling disconnected. And stories that really move people and make people care are the ones where they feel some sort of connection.

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

People see truth in my films. That's what they react to, and that's what they relate to.

I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.

You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.

While eschewing emotion - and its companion, vulnerability - Obama should be careful not to sacrifice empathy, the 'I feel your pain' connection that sustained Clinton. This connection is the shorthand people use to measure their leaders' intentions. If people believe you're on their side, they will trust your decisions.

Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

The more you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the more people will be able to relate and learn from you, because we're all human.

My music is straightforward because I want to give people me and let them know they're not alone in going through the things that they go through.

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

I've come to realize that people connect more when they know you're telling them the truth or some aspect of your story, some mutated version of how you are experiencing this life.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

I can't believe when you write something from within, how many people relate to it.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

I show them the funny part, the silly part, the laughing part, the crazy part and then the really deep, deep part where I'm talking from my heart to these people. Because I've been through everything they've been through.