Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken!

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mix tapes in the '90s than I did in college. You're learning about rise and fall and energy and tempo shifts. You're showing off your taste and your references. You're trying to be witty by - through placement of music you didn't write.

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

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.

I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

Every heart is made of stories.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

When you're an artist you're speaking about life, you're talking about your experience here on the planet. So essentially, that's what I do when I'm writing songs.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

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.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.