Creativity Quote by Judy Collins

There is a sly humility in Collins claiming ignorance while also hinting at forbidden knowledge. Songwriting, in her telling, isn’t a craft you can fully diagram; it’s an encounter. The ellipses do real work here, letting the sentence drift the way inspiration supposedly does, and making “I don’t know” feel less like a shrug than a kind of reverence.

The subtext is a quiet pushback against the modern hunger to demystify everything. We live in an era that wants origin stories: the exact trauma, the exact chord change, the neat narrative of how art gets made. Collins refuses that transaction. “If I knew, I’d know too much” turns self-knowledge into a threat, as if the muse is less a personal brand than a doorway you’re not meant to keep open too long. It’s also an artist protecting the private machinery of her work; naming the source might cheapen it, or tempt you to believe you can reproduce it on demand.

Context matters: Collins came up through the folk revival, where songs were treated like living things, passed hand to hand, not merely authored objects. Her career has always balanced interpretive brilliance (making others’ songs feel inevitable in her voice) with her own writing, so “where my songs come from” can mean tradition, memory, and something stranger. The phrase “on this plane” leans spiritual without going full New Age: a lightly worn metaphysics that frames creativity as a visitation, not a possession. It’s a defense of wonder that doesn’t need to be proved to be useful.