Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

Thompson is smuggling an ethical warning into what sounds like craft advice: you never get to be an invisible hand. Even when a songwriter hides behind character or story, the choices of detail, tone, and judgment leak the author onto the page. That is the “presence” he’s talking about, and it cuts against the romantic myth of the neutral observer who can describe people without taking a position.

The second move is what makes the line sting. “If you get close to what human beings are like” is a demand for accuracy, not niceness. Thompson’s work has always had a scalpel edge - portraits of vanity, cruelty, self-sabotage - but he’s arguing that the sharper the portrait, the less it can be pure contempt. Common experience is his antidote to cheap superiority. If you really “nail” somebody - capture their tells, rationalizations, little self-serving myths - you’ve mapped the machinery you share with them. The writer’s weapon turns into a mirror.

There’s a cultural context here too: the folk-rock tradition of observational storytelling, and the late-20th-century suspicion of confessional sincerity. Thompson splits the difference. He isn’t saying every song should be autobiography; he’s saying every song is implicated. Write a villain well enough and you can’t pretend you’re not in the same species, running the same flawed code. That’s why it works: it reframes empathy as accuracy’s unavoidable consequence, and self-knowledge as the price of being convincingly unsparing.