It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books–not part of me, all of me–and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Jeanette Winterson
About This Quote

The idea that a book you write comes from a part of you that is separate from the book itself is an odd one. If the words of a book come from a part of you, there is no room for them to be expressed in a way that makes sense. A book is not a person, and it is not a collection of words. A book is not even a story.

The idea of writing as an extension of yourself, of writing as something you’re doing yourself instead of the work you do for someone else, has been a major influence on a lot of work I’ve done. It’s helped me to break away from the idea that my books were something I was doing for other people and to see them as my own.

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