Jayne Anne Phillips Quotations

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced - though I was adult - but I still grappled with being responsible to both of them.

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.

I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.

It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

I don't write a novel every two years.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Talk between women friends is always therapy...

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

I wish I had more time to write.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.