She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes were more modest --...
She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, '...
She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.
She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets, But there were losses. There always were.
Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of...
Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer suns...
Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over...
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same as being happy- which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes...
Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught...
Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, li...
People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone’s stood on it. I don’t think so. It would take more than a man’s foot to steal the moon.
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between th...
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.
One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but thats quite hard to say casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because the...
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping...
Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of...
Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.
Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you ca...
Nobody can afford to sleep anymore. Do you realise how much it costs?