Life's Pleasures Quote by Cecil B. DeMille

Addiction is DeMille's most honest metaphor: not the romantic artist "inspired" by a muse, but the industrial showman chemically dependent on making something big enough to blot out silence. "Creation" here isn't a tender act; it's appetite. The line frames production as a bodily need, the kind that keeps you pacing when the set goes dark and the crowd goes home. For a producer - not a solitary novelist, not even a director - that matters. DeMille's creation is managerial, logistical, capital-intensive. It's the orchestration of hundreds of people and millions of dollars into a single controlled hallucination.

The subtext is self-justification and warning at once. Calling it a drug normalizes the compulsion: if he can't stop, it's not just vanity, it's chemistry. It also flatters the work by implying withdrawal would be catastrophic, as if the world itself would dull without the next spectacle. Coming from the architect of Hollywood biblical epics, the word "creation" carries a sly double charge: he sells Genesis on screen while admitting he's chasing his own private rush. The producer as demiurge, but also as junkie.

Context sharpens it. DeMille built in the studio era, when filmmaking was assembly-line art with moral guardians at the gate and audiences hungry for grandeur during war, depression, and postwar anxiety. His films weren't merely entertainment; they were civic rituals in widescreen. The quote captures the engine behind that machine: not pure faith, not pure commerce, but the compulsive need to keep manufacturing awe.