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Creativity Quote by Sarah McLachlan

"Deadlines are meant to be broken. And I just keep breaking them"

About this Quote

“Deadlines are meant to be broken. And I just keep breaking them” lands like a confessional wrapped in a punchline: the kind of line you toss off with a half-laugh because admitting the truth straight would sting. McLachlan flips the usual moral about deadlines being sacred into something closer to a coping mechanism. The first sentence pretends to be a philosophy - deadlines as flimsy, even tyrannical structures - but the second sentence collapses that pose into personal habit. She isn’t bragging about rebellion; she’s naming a pattern.

The intent feels less like anti-work swagger and more like an artist describing the friction between creative time and industrial time. Music is emotional labor that doesn’t clock in neatly, yet the modern musician lives inside schedules: label timetables, tour routing, promo cycles, award-season calendars, streaming-era “content” demands. The subtext is that the clock is always present, and it’s always losing to the slow, messy process of getting a song to feel true. “Keep breaking them” reads like self-deprecation, but also like quiet resistance: a refusal to let administration define the pace of the interior life.

It also hints at the cost. Chronic deadline-breaking can be romanticized as artistic temperament, but it’s usually anxiety, perfectionism, or burnout wearing a leather jacket. McLachlan’s line works because it holds both stories at once: the wry self-awareness of someone who knows the rule, and the weary honesty of someone who can’t - or won’t - live by it.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
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More Quotes by Sarah Add to List
Breaking Deadlines: Sarah McLachlan on Creative Timing
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About the Author

Sarah McLachlan

Sarah McLachlan (born January 28, 1968) is a Musician from Canada.

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