Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
— Jeanette Winterson
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
What you risk reveals what you value.
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.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
