Jayne Anne Phillips

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“I don't write a novel every two years.”

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

“I wish I had more time to write.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Talk between women friends is always therapy...”