Jane Hirshfield Quotes

You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.

Every single lyric I've ever written I meant.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that's gone into my song writing.

Because I'm a dramatist, I'm allowed to take liberties, but I want my films to be based in truth, and it's very important to me that the community we're focusing on is happy with the film. From an ethical point of view, that's everything.

Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man.

A poet's first contract is with truth.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Convert life into truth.

A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'

I'm not a politician; I am a singer. Long ago, they said, 'That one, she sings politics.' I don't sing politics; I merely sing the truth.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

Is not the truth the truth?

"The way I feel about music -- any song, any style -- is that there is no right and wrong, only true and false. If the music and lyrics are conceived out of honesty and if the production of the song goes along with its original message, then what has been expressed is art, regardless of what anyone's opinion is of it. So things are a lots impler if you just tell the truth.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.

Truth, in the broadest sense, means being attuned with the real. To be authentically in touch with the true, and the good and the beautiful. Yes?

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Everything we're singing about is true, and even when you take away all the glitz, it's still true in the darkest, ugliest and most hopeless places.

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

Sometimes the truth don't rhyme

I've gotten to the point where I realize that I need to tell my truth in music and not walk around blabbing my mind.