Creativity Quote by Paul Simon

For a songwriter whose job is to turn private weather into public melody, “I always get very calm with baseball” reads like an admission of needing an off-switch. Baseball isn’t just entertainment here; it’s a technology of tempo. The sport’s famous slowness, its long stretches of “nothing” punctuated by a crack of consequence, offers a counter-rhythm to the jittery, overinterpreted life of an artist. Calm doesn’t arrive through escape so much as through structure: innings, counts, outs. The mind can finally stop freelancing.

Simon’s intent feels almost deflationary, a little joke against the mythology of the tortured genius. You’d expect transcendence from music, but he’s saying the opposite: transcendence is too demanding. Baseball asks less and gives more. You can pay attention without being consumed; you can care without the claustrophobia of identity. For someone routinely treated as a “voice of a generation,” that’s not small. It’s a claim that a person can be temporarily unimportant, and that this is healthy.

There’s subtext, too, in the choice of baseball specifically. This is an American ritual that runs on patience, failure, and tiny adjustments - a worldview that quietly rhymes with craft songwriting. You don’t “win” a song in one swing; you accumulate good at-bats. Calm, in that sense, is not numbness. It’s the emotional posture that makes repetition bearable, lets disappointment stay proportional, and keeps you in the game long enough for something beautiful to happen.