Creativity Quote by Michael Nesmith

Nesmith’s joke lands because it treats inspiration like a celebrity sighting: dazzling, random, and gone before you can get a photo. The setup is swaggering ("I coined a word") and the punchline instantly deflates it ("but I forgot what it was"), poking fun at the romantic myth of the artist as a steady fountain of genius. He’s not denying creativity; he’s teasing its unreliability, the way a great idea can feel momentous at 3 a.m. and evaporate by breakfast.

The dream detail is doing double duty. On one hand it’s a classic musician’s alibi for epiphany, that woozy, half-mystical zone where melodies and lines supposedly arrive fully formed. On the other, it’s a sly admission that the mind is a messy collaborator. If the word came from a dream, it didn’t come from a disciplined workshop; it came from a place you can’t control or reliably revisit. That makes the forgetting not a failure so much as part of the bargain.

There’s also a quiet satire of ownership in "coined". To coin a word is to claim creation, to stamp it into circulation. Nesmith undercuts that possessiveness: the supposed invention can’t even be produced on demand. Coming from a Monkees-era figure who spent a career negotiating authenticity, commerce, and craft, the line reads like an insider’s wink at the industry’s obsession with marketable originality. Sometimes the best "new thing" exists only as a private, vanishing thrill.