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 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.

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

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

I don't write a novel every two years.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I wish I had more time to write.

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

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

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

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

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.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

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

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.

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

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.