Jayne Anne Phillips quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Talk between women friends is always therapy...

I don't write a novel every two years.

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

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

Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don't originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don't know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases. - From "Why She Writes

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.

I wish I had more time to write.

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

Love is the outlaw's duty.

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.

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

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.

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.

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