Jayne Anne Phillips

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

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

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

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 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.

I don't write a novel every two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.