34 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I don't write a novel every two years.

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