I value the people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable and share work that is sensitive and maybe even hard to sing sometimes. Because that's the music that provides the most solace and solidarity to the world.
You don't have to make something in order to retain your identity as an artist or a writer or a creative person. A lot of people think they have to be producing in order to maintain that identity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
An artist's identity isn't solely defined by their creations; it's about their inherent creativity.
This quote by Lucy Dacus emphasizes that being an artist, writer, or creative individual is not contingent upon constant production. Many people mistakenly believe that their creative identity is tied only to the work they produce; however, one's identity as a creative person exists independently of the quantity or frequency of their output. This viewpoint encourages creatives to value their identity and perspective, even during periods of inactivity or absence of completed work.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During an art workshop, to encourage participants who feel pressured to constantly create.
More from Lucy Dacus
All quotes →I like to think of hope as a fact and something that wins out always. Whether you're hopeful or not, actually, you do get through what you're in the middle of. When you're in it, you don't feel like that's possible. But time and time again, we're proven wrong.
When you're a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.
You have to laugh at things in order to let them be what they truly are. Because nothing is only sad. Nothing is only funny. There's context to all of those things.
Similar quotes
Look, Salvador Dali did not paint because he needed the money. No conversation about materialism and music makes sense. You make music and that's that, it doesn't matter why.
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do.
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.