Art & Creativity Quote by Jeanette Winterson

Refusing reviews isn’t just thin-skinned self-protection; it’s a declaration of artistic time. Winterson draws a hard line between the moment of making and the moment of public judgment, insisting that criticism arrives after the only phase that matters to the artist: the book’s becoming. “Too late” reads like a shrug, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the contemporary hunger for instant feedback, the idea that every work should remain editable, responsive, optimized. In her frame, literature isn’t software.

The subtext is about authority and vulnerability. Reviews promise a kind of mastery over a text - to name its flaws, diagnose its ambitions, grade its success. Winterson denies that power by treating the book as a finished object with its own fate, no longer hers to bargain over. There’s a protective austerity here: if the work is done, then the author’s job is done too. The line “It is written” lands like a stamp, almost biblical in its finality, the passive voice making the text feel less like a product and more like an event that has already occurred.

Context matters: Winterson’s career has unfolded in a culture that increasingly conflates reception with worth, and where writers are expected to perform endless permeability - on social media, in interviews, in the review economy. Her stance isn’t anti-criticism so much as anti-contamination. She’s defending the solitude required to write from the noise that tries to rename your work after the fact, and, by extension, rename you.