Jane Hirshfield Quotes

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.

My process of working is that I don't create a picture, I find it.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

Art is an investigation.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

Music is not math. It's science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It's more of an exploration and discovery.

For me, food and music are very similar in that you create, you spend a lot of time making something, and it only lasts a few seconds or a few minutes.

I think the intuitive processes of discovery are the same, very much the same, in the arts as in the sciences.

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.