Creativity Quote by Paul Simon

Paul Simon is doing something that reads cold on the page but plays like a veteran staking out territory after the fact: he’s drawing a hard border between “singing” and “making.” In one breath he gives Artie Garfunkel his due - a singer - then stacks his own credits like a résumé built for the liner notes: writer, player, singer. The repetition of “and” isn’t just grammar; it’s accumulation, a way of turning authorship into a pile of undeniable labor.

The key phrase is “on a creative level.” It’s careful, almost legalistic, the kind of distinction you reach for when you know the public has already written a romance about the partnership. Simon isn’t denying collaboration in the broad sense (two voices, one sound); he’s rejecting the mythology that the songs emerged from shared inspiration. “We didn’t... prepare the songs” frames the work as craft: arranging, rehearsing, assembling the thing that people later call magic.

Then comes the blunt hammer: “I did that.” No flourish, no diplomacy. It’s the sound of someone tired of being edited into a duo narrative when his self-conception is auteur. In the Simon & Garfunkel story, the culture loves symmetry: two faces, two harmonies, two equals. Simon’s sentence resists that packaging. It insists that the emotional product listeners cherish - the intimacy, the ache, the elegance - was built upstream, in solitary decisions about words, chords, and structure, long before Artie’s voice made it famous.