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"We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it."
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"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."
"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."
"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
Explore more quotes by Jeanette Winterson
"People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe."
"The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all."
"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call."
"St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry."
"You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there."
"Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead."
"If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me."
"I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me."
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