Jane Yolen Quotes

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.

I'm not good at talking, but I can write a good song and tell a story.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.

I used to want to be a children's writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I'd write them and draw them, and turn them into class.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I make up stories in my head all the time, but I've never written them down. But I write a lot of story songs. Any song I'm singing, I sort of see it like a movie in my head. That's why a lot of times I close my eyes when I'm singing.

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part.

I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I love telling a story through song. It helps me take it to a deeper place.

It's not just music. To me, it's songwriting more than anything. A lot of people say it's expression, but to me, it's more than that.

I always composed music as a little kid.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.