Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.
— Jayne Anne Phillips
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 don't write a novel every two years.
I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.
Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.
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.
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.
I wish I had more time to write.
I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.
I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.
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.
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.
Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.
I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.
I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.
