Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"Why is the measure of love loss?"

"I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance."

"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."

"Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."