Jane Hirshfield Quotes

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

Solitude is creativity's best friend, and solitude is refreshment for our souls.

I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

I mostly write on my own, walking, outside.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

Words make love with one another.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

I'm really honored that Bon Iver gives me a platform to do whatever I want, but there's only so much time you can spend digging through yourself before you become insular. I'm not in a hurry to go back to that temperature.

All good writing comes out of aloneness.