Art & Creativity Quote by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson’s line refuses the polite museum-frame idea of art as a nice-to-have, the cultural equivalent of scented candles. “Luxury” is the decoy word here: it suggests surplus, status, a purchase you justify after rent is paid. By rejecting it, she’s calling out the way capitalism and class quietly police who gets to claim art as “for them” and who’s expected to treat it as garnish. The sentence is built like a trapdoor: you step onto “art,” expecting decoration, and she drops you into “mind-altering,” a phrase borrowed from the language of drugs, revelation, conversion.

That choice isn’t accidental. Winterson has always written as if the self is editable - sexuality, desire, memory, narrative, all re-scripted through story. “Possibility” is the crucial pivot: art isn’t merely a stimulant or an escape hatch; it’s an opening in the mental architecture. She’s defending art’s capacity to change what feels thinkable, livable, permissible. Not self-care, not uplift, but cognitive reprogramming.

The subtext also pushes back against a contemporary cynicism that treats art as either content (to be consumed) or ornament (to be displayed). Winterson insists on art’s more dangerous function: it reorganizes attention, makes new metaphors available, shifts the moral weather. In an era where “practical” is often code for “profitable,” she’s arguing that the most practical thing might be the one that changes the mind that makes all the other choices.