Jayne Anne Phillips

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

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

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.

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.

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