Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer, born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
guild member subversive
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.
builds image inside maybe periods tension time via work
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.
adult bind both business divided divorced kids though
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.
larger provides writers
Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.
carefully paragraph
I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
book books children valued war women
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.
work
I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.
trying
Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.
suggested
Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.
writing secret life-is
The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.
loyalty firsts morality
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.
therapy
Talk between women friends is always therapy...
wind silence vibrations
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.
country memories distance
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.