Creativity Quote by Roberta Flack

Flack’s line lands with the calm authority of someone who’s watched the music business turn “expression” into inventory, and still insists the work can mean more than units moved. She doesn’t romanticize artistry as pure self-expression; she frames it as a transaction: musicians “sell material” for people to “hear and absorb.” That blunt verb choice is the point. It admits the marketplace without letting the marketplace off the hook. If what you make gets taken into other people’s bodies and days - played at weddings, funerals, protests, late-night drives - then it carries consequences.

The phrase “use that voice wisely” sounds almost old-fashioned, but the subtext is contemporary: influence isn’t optional when you have reach. Flack’s catalog has always been about emotional precision, not volume. Songs like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly” don’t shout a message; they slip inside listeners, rearranging mood and memory. That’s why “absorb” matters. She’s describing art as something metabolized, not merely consumed.

Contextually, Flack came up in an era when Black artists were both culturally central and commercially constrained, expected to be palatable while bearing social meaning. Her sentence threads that needle: yes, you’re a product in a system; no, you don’t get to pretend your work is harmless. “Wisely” is her quiet rebuke to cynicism, and to opportunism: if you’re going to sell people something they’ll live with, you’d better be careful what you’re putting into them.