Jeanette Winterson

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don’t matter a bit. I have had plenty of each and they have only encouraged me, but dinginess, the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible.

it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle

To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition

‘Grant me’ . . . fame? money? success? No. Just the knack of knowing when to stop.

‘you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.’

How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy – which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.

Do we see what we think we see? Do we love as we believe we love?