1,104 Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

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.

Their throats were bare for God.

We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?

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.

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

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.