Jeanette Winterson Want Quotations

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it...

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don't want this physical object to disappear, because when it's there and it's present, it's continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn't.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.