Creativity Quote by Lesley Gore

There is a quietly radical honesty in admitting that writing wasn’t some thunderbolt of inspiration, but a daily strategy for staying alive to your own identity. Lesley Gore frames songwriting less as a job than as a ritual: a way to “wake up in the morning” and still belong to the life she’d chosen, even when the phone wasn’t ringing. That’s a musician talking from the long middle stretch of a career, when the spotlight flickers and the hardest work is maintaining the self who once stood confidently inside it.

The line also punctures a romantic myth about artists: that they create only when seized by genius or paid to deliver a product. Gore’s phrasing is almost domestic - “have something to do” - which makes the subtext sharper. Writing becomes the workaround for an industry that turns artistry into intermittent employment. If the market can’t guarantee you’ll “be” a musician every day, you build a practice that can.

Context matters here because Gore knew what it meant to be publicly defined early. She was a teen star with a voice that carried both sweetness and bite, and she later navigated the shrinking shelf space given to women once youth stops being the selling point. Her intent sounds practical, but it’s also a refusal: a decision to locate musicianship in process rather than permission. The most affecting part is the conditional at the end - “even if I wasn’t working” - which reveals the anxiety underneath and, at the same time, her method for outsmarting it.