Creativity Quote by Johnny Cash

Cash is describing craft the way he lived it: unsentimental, physical, and a little haunted. The line isn’t a self-deprecating quip so much as a working man’s admission that inspiration is cheap and judgment is the real talent. “I start a lot more songs than I finish” punctures the romantic myth of the songwriter as a lightning-rod genius. For Cash, creation is closer to carpentry: you cut, you test the fit, you toss what doesn’t hold weight.

The interesting move is what he does with failure. He doesn’t “throw them away.” He “put[s] them away, store[s] them.” That’s not sentimentality; it’s discipline with a farmer’s thrift. Bad songs aren’t shameful, they’re inventory. The subtext is that the line between “no good” and “not yet” can be thin, and the author’s job is to keep the room clear enough to hear the difference. Getting them “out of sight” reads like emotional hygiene: protect your attention from half-baked ideas that keep calling for rescue.

Context matters because Cash’s career was built on blunt storytelling and moral weather, not ornate experimentation. He wrote from a place where the stakes felt real - prisons, gospel, addiction, regret - and that demands ruthless editing. The quote also foreshadows his late-career renaissance: an artist who survives by pruning. He’s telling younger creators that professionalism isn’t constant output; it’s the courage to shelve what doesn’t ring true, even when it came from you.