Jeanette Winterson

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.