Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Jayne Anne Phillips

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I wish I had more time to write.

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.

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

I don't write a novel every two years.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Talk between women friends is always therapy.

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

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.

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.

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

Love is the outlaw's duty.

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

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