Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

In songwriting, I needed language. And I always believed in singing about what I do.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people.

The songs are inspired by my experiences. Sometimes they are more than my real-life and, conversely, my life is more than just my songs.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

Whether I'm acting, writing, or directing, I want to tell the truth about human beings, especially my folk.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I can definitely say that of all my friends who I consider to be really great cartoonists, we're all trying to aim at basically the same thing, which is an ever closer representation of what it feels like to be alive.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

I did not want to be the gay artist, and I talked to my manager all the time, like, I don't want to lead with that. I didn't want people to look at me like that's all I am.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

I'm going to keep doing the comedy and the art that I do. I'm going to keep uplifting marginalized voices, and I think that's my place to do that.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees.