Jane Hirshfield Quotes

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

All too often too often we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Make good art.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

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.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

A good artist has less time than ideas.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper. And the paper is talking before you do.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.