Literary Birthday – 19 July – Jayne Anne Phillips

Happy Birthday, Jayne Anne Phillips, born on 19 July 1952.

Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

1. The process of writing is continual. Whether or not I’m working on the book, the book is working on me. (NarrativeMagazine)
2. Feeling a true passion for literature is almost like membership in a medieval guild, a time when artist monks wrote out illumined texts and comprised most of their readership. Flashing forward, one can imagine, after the dystopian Long Pause or Full Stop—the cessation of the machine, the end of readily available electricity—forest dwellers and urban survivors breaking into structures looking for canned food and…books. (LitHub)
3. My novels begin with the voice of a character involved in an ongoing, specific situation. (LitHub)
4. Memory is research, because we forget so much, and one recovered detail leads to another. (LitHub)
5. I used to tell my students that writing is comparable to that space movie where the astronaut gets shoved off the ship, wearing the silver suit, with a long tube connecting him to it—and then the tube comes off somehow, and he just drifts out into space forever. For me, that’s what writing can feel like: very subterranean, where the writer has no real sense of where they are in space or where they are in the narrative. (HippoCampus)
6. I feel like writing and art are so important right now because we need a sense of connection, a sense of hope, and a sense of awe. (HippoCampus)
7. When you sit down to write, you spend a long time just sitting there, at least I do. But you’re staying inside a kind of frame of mind that’s like a reverse meditation. As a writer, you don’t meditate to clear your mind; you meditate to get inside the material that you’re working with.  (HippoCampus)
8. When I am writing, I feel intense pressure to write as much as possible, get as deep into the project as possible. And it’s a terrifying way to work, but in a strange way the book itself, the work I’ve already written, has to be very compelling to me, and pull me back into it. Even if I’ve been away from it for three months. (LARB)
9. My work is very sensory, very physical in the real world, because that’s how I think you connect with a reader. It sets up all kinds of associations that I will never know about, associations the reader brings to the work, associations kicked off by things that are unconscious. (LARB)
10. I think of plot as this kind of spiral construction with an incredible amount of energy inside it. It comes from the center and moves out. (LARB)

Jayne Anne Phillips is an award-winning American novelist and short-story writer known for her powerful, character-driven fiction. She is best known for her literary fiction, which explores family, history, memory, and resilience. Her novels include Machine Dreams, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. She is also the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Black Tickets. Phillips has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first work of non-fiction is the memoir Small Town Girls. Throughout her career, Phillips has received numerous fellowships, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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