Creativity Quote by James Galway

“Being unprepared heightens nerves” lands like a musician’s anti-myth: the idea that stage fright is some mysterious curse that strikes the gifted and the weak alike. James Galway, a performer whose career depends on turning breath into control, points a finger at something less romantic and more fixable - preparation as the hidden architecture of confidence.

The intent is practical, almost parental. Galway isn’t shaming anxiety so much as demystifying it. Nerves aren’t just personality; they’re often information. If you haven’t done the work, your body knows before your brain wants to admit it. The subtext is that “nerves” can be a convenient alibi in the arts, a way to narrate missed notes as fate or temperament. Galway reframes them as a predictable consequence: when the foundations are shaky, the spotlight feels harsher.

Context matters because classical performance is a high-wire act where tiny errors read as big ones. Galway came up in a world of auditions, juries, orchestral hierarchies, and recording permanence - environments that punish improvisational bravado. In that ecosystem, preparation isn’t only practice hours; it’s developing a relationship with the material so deep that adrenaline becomes fuel, not sabotage.

There’s also a subtle generosity here. If nerves are heightened by being unprepared, then calm is not an innate gift reserved for prodigies. It’s craft. Galway’s line offers agency: you may not control the room, the critic, or the acoustics, but you can control whether you walk onstage carrying doubt you earned.