"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."
— Jayne Anne Phillips

"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."
— Jayne Anne Phillips