Jane Yolen Quotes

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

I think there's something beautiful about the art of making art, and it just will live and breathe.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I don't understand how people live without creating.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

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.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

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.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

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

Make good art.