Creativity Quote by Beverly Sills

“I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar” lands with the brassy, no-apologies pragmatism of someone who’s paid her dues in public. Beverly Sills isn’t romanticizing suffering; she’s itemizing it. “Garbage” is deliberately crude, a word that drags glamour down to the curb. Coming from an opera star - a profession drenched in velvet myth - it punctures the fantasy that greatness arrives on a cushion of applause. She’s reminding you that the road to the Met is also bus rides, rejection, bad gigs, and the humiliations that don’t make the playbill.

The second sentence flips the moral script. “Might as well” is the tell: it’s not greed, it’s restitution. After years of scraping by, she refuses the cultural expectation that artists should stay grateful, modest, and aesthetically pure even when the money finally shows up. Caviar isn’t just luxury; it’s permission to enjoy the visible rewards without performing shame. It’s also a wink at class mobility: if you’ve been forced to eat dirt, you don’t owe anyone a lifelong diet of virtue.

In Sills’s era, especially for women in high culture, success came with an extra tax: be extraordinary, then be self-effacing about it. This line rejects that script. The subtext is blunt: survival wasn’t ennobling, it was exhausting. Now let the good part count.