Jane Hirshfield Quotes

I just like being creative, whatever way I have to do it.

Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

I think it's a big part of being a creative person.

All I know is when I start getting serious about songwriting... it's like a playground. All responsibilities slip away and you're with your essence. There can be delight there and self-discovery. You can dance there... I think of it as my serious playground.

Without freedom, there is no creation.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

Creativity is a religion. When you get into it, you will find your life becomes more spiritual.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Hospital'. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Pablo Picasso'. I've been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I'm interested in creating new work.

My photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn't exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living.

Having fun is fantastic, and I never want to lose a sense of that - and also, I think, you have to have that to put into your work, or else it's going to feel stiff.

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

The lead of a film that wove around me, I played all the roles. I traveled the world; I loved life, pleasure. I adored to write, create.

Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.