Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

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

I wish I had more time to write.

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.

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

Love is the outlaw's duty.

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

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

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