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Creativity Quote by Chantal Kreviazuk

"I can't say I want to earn a particular award or sell a certain number of records, because even if I do that, the satisfaction only lasts five minutes"

About this Quote

Kreviazuk’s line is a neat demolition of the scoreboard mindset that still haunts pop success. She doesn’t posture as above ambition; she admits the temptation, then punctures it with a brutally specific metric: five minutes. That tiny unit of time does more work than a whole paragraph of therapy-speak. It frames awards and sales not as meaningless, but as chemically short-lived highs - a dopamine spike that collapses almost as soon as the applause turns into next week’s release schedule.

The intent reads like self-protection, but it’s also an argument about how the music industry trains artists to outsource their self-worth. Numbers and trophies are clean, public, easy to compare. They’re also endlessly renewable problems. Hit a target and the target instantly moves, because culture moves. The subtext is fatigue with being measured - not just by charts, but by the internalized voice that says your art only counts when it’s validated at scale.

Context matters: a working musician’s career is a long negotiation between private craft and public reception. Kreviazuk is pointing to the mismatch between how songs are made (slow, intimate, uncertain) and how success is tallied (fast, loud, binary). The “five minutes” isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a plea for a more sustainable reason to keep going - process over prizes, meaning over metrics, the daily durability of making something honest in a culture addicted to instant proof.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Kreviazuk, Chantal. (2026, January 15). I can't say I want to earn a particular award or sell a certain number of records, because even if I do that, the satisfaction only lasts five minutes. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cant-say-i-want-to-earn-a-particular-award-or-140122/

Chicago Style
Kreviazuk, Chantal. "I can't say I want to earn a particular award or sell a certain number of records, because even if I do that, the satisfaction only lasts five minutes." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cant-say-i-want-to-earn-a-particular-award-or-140122/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I can't say I want to earn a particular award or sell a certain number of records, because even if I do that, the satisfaction only lasts five minutes." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cant-say-i-want-to-earn-a-particular-award-or-140122/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Chantal Kreviazuk on lasting creative motivation
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About the Author

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Chantal Kreviazuk (born May 18, 1974) is a Musician from Canada.

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