Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

#1. I wish I had more time to write.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#6. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#12. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#14. Love is the outlaw's duty.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#16. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#17. I don't write a novel every two years.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#18. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#21. Talk between women friends is always therapy ...

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#23. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#24. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#25. 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.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips