advice
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.
University of California Riverside commencement address, 1975
Try micro-dosing your change. Bring difference and variety into your life. Don’t keep doing what makes you feel dull, rigid, resentful, whatever. Be creative in the small changes—that, in itself, makes you mindful and aware. You’re not just going through the motions; you’re in motion.
“The Challenge of Change,” Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, February 20, 2022.
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself…
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 ), 12.
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 41.
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 25.
Better walk than ride like that.
1001 Yiddish Proverbs by Fred Kogos (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1970), 29.
A fast buck is better than a slow ten.
Conversation at Hank’s Alley, Tarrytown, New York
When you allow yourself to be negative, you add to the burdens of the world.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 148.
Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 259.
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
“Everything I Know About Writing Poetry,” in A Hundred White Daffodils (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 141.
Though I was always waked for eclipses, and indeed carried to the window as an infant in arms and shown Halley’s Comet in my sleep, and though I’d been taught at our diningroom table about the solar system and knew the earth revolved around the sun, and our moon around us, I never found out the moon didn’t come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: “Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.”
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10–11.
The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.
In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed by Tomas Leach (2014).