Creativity Quote by Dorothy Fields

Fields isn’t dispensing cozy career advice; she’s issuing a survival note from inside the American song factory. “Should have friends” sounds gentle, but it’s really about infrastructure: taste gets built in conversation, and opportunity travels through people long before it becomes a contract. In the Tin Pan Alley-to-Broadway ecosystem where Fields made her name, songs weren’t solitary poems. They were products shaped by collaborators, performers, producers, and the nightly stress test of an audience. If you weren’t in the room - literal or social - you didn’t just miss gigs, you missed the evolving grammar of what worked.

The subtext is pragmatic and a little unsentimental: talent isn’t enough, and isolation is a professional disadvantage. “Similarly interested” is doing quiet work here. Fields isn’t talking about friends who flatter you; she’s pointing to peers who speak the same obsessive language, who can argue about a bridge, swap a lead, or tell you when a lyric lands wrong. It’s a call for friction, not validation.

Then there’s the phrase “milieu of work he has chosen for himself,” which subtly shifts responsibility back onto the writer. The “milieu” isn’t a glamorous scene you get admitted to; it’s something you commit to and navigate daily. Coming from a woman who thrived in a male-dominated industry, the line also carries an edge of strategy: community isn’t just inspiration, it’s protection, leverage, and staying power.