Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

#1. Jayne Anne Phillips ... is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite ... This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.

Robert Olen Butler

#2. If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian| warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men - and cowards.

Erwin Schrodinger

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#4. 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

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#6. 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

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#10. We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect.

Paolo Bacigalupi

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#13. The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.

Sherman Alexie

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#19. The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.

Michael J. Fox

#20. God empowered him; and my father, when he stood to preach, he wasn't preaching his message, he was preaching God's message.

Franklin Graham

#21. 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

#22. This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.

Matt Taibbi

#23. Thinking beyond the human condition often transcends us from it.

Gary Hopkins

#24. Hello, Doctor. It's your man.

J.R. Ward

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#27. An' when they git ready ... I say, when they git ... ever hear tell of a shoggoth? 'Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I seen 'em one mght when ... eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh ...

H.P. Lovecraft

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#31. Love is the outlaw's duty.

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#33. Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.

Annie Dillard

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

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

Jayne Anne Phillips

#38. 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

#39. The path of precept is long, that of example short and effectual.

Seneca The Younger