Jeanette Winterson

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

What you risk reveals what you value.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.