Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.

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

I don't write a novel every two years.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I wish I had more time to write.

Talk between women friends is always therapy ...

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.

I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid, the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me, pay my way with what your skin knows.

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.

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

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

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.

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.