It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
StingRead
I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.
Interpretation
Creativity can arise from genuine experiences rather than forced negativity.
In this quote, Sting emphasizes that true creativity does not require the artificial inflating of emotional struggles or trauma. Instead, he suggests that authentic experiences of sadness or emotional distress can provide ample inspiration for artistic expression, highlighting the importance of genuine feelings over manufactured hardship.
In practice
A speaker at an art workshop may use this quote to encourage participants to embrace their true feelings.
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success.
If you make your living writing, and you can't write anything, it's over. It's very frightening.
It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.
I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised.
There's no religion but sex and music.
It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.
The man is either mad, or he is making verses.
Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so
The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play.
The role of an orchestra in the 21st century isn't just playing, it's about developing future audiences and performers.
I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.
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