"And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?"

"Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'.It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'."

"Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it."

"Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?"

"The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own."

"This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer."

"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."

"They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid."

"The past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance."

"I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle."

"There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out."

"Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening."

"Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence."

"In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.Feel for yourself."

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

"Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break."

"What makes up a life, events or the recollection of events?How much of recollection is invention?Whose invention?"

"What you think is the heart might well be another organ."

"Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement."

"In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.Feeling is frightening."

"Unmoor the boat, we could go, downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it's all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat."

"Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places."

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

"Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world."

"I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons."

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

"I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you."

"Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription."