Creativity Quote by Laura Nyro

Nyro’s line lands like a gentle slap at the identity-industrial complex that grew around late-60s pop: the idea that you’re not just making songs, you’re supposed to market a persona. “I don’t think you should categorize yourself as an artist” isn’t anti-art; it’s anti-label. Coming from a musician who wrote with the ambition of a composer and the intimacy of a diarist, it reads as a protective spell against being pinned down by critics, record executives, or even your own ego.

The specific intent is pragmatic: stop turning the work into a brand. Once you announce “I am an Artist,” you invite a whole bureaucracy of expectations - authenticity tests, genre policing, the myth that inspiration must look a certain way. Nyro’s phrasing matters: “categorize yourself” puts the danger inside the self, not just the industry. The most limiting box is the one you climb into willingly, because it starts shaping your choices before you even touch the piano.

Subtextually, it’s also a refusal of hierarchy. Calling yourself an artist can smuggle in a claim to specialness, a social exemption. Nyro pushes toward craft, discipline, and lived experience over cultural status. Given her era - when women songwriters were often treated as interpreters at best, “confessional” curiosities at worst - the line doubles as a way to dodge a patronizing frame. Don’t let them make you into a category; keep moving, keep making, stay slippery. The work can be grand. The label just gets in the way.