Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling.…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

“The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have…

— 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…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

I wish I had more time to write.

— Jayne Anne Phillips

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

I don't write a novel every two years.

— Jayne Anne Phillips

“Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

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

— Jayne Anne Phillips

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are…

— Jayne Anne Phillips