Quotes from Jayne Anne Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 wish I had more time to write.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

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

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

Talk between women friends is always therapy.

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.

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.

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.

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