Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

“I try to look for the good in everybody” is the kind of line that can sound like Hallmark wallpaper until you notice the escape hatch built into it: “regardless of the way they’re labeled.” Thompson isn’t selling naïve optimism; he’s describing a discipline. The verb “try” matters. It admits failure, fatigue, and the daily friction of keeping your curiosity intact in a culture that rewards instant judgment.

“Labeled” is the real tell. It’s not just about people being misunderstood; it’s about how quickly identity gets reduced to a tag you didn’t choose. In a musician’s mouth, that word is doubly loaded. Thompson has spent decades being filed under genres and scenes that never fully fit: folk-rock, British traditional, singer-songwriter, electric virtuoso, purist, heretic. The line reads like an artist’s survival strategy against the flattening force of categorization. When the world insists on a neat box, he answers with a refusal to let the box do his thinking.

Subtext: moral imagination is an act of resistance. “Regardless” signals a pushback against tribal sorting - political, cultural, even aesthetic - where the label becomes a permission slip to dismiss the person attached to it. Thompson’s stance is less “everyone is good” than “don’t outsource your judgment to branding.” It’s an ethic that also makes for better songs: complex characters, mixed motives, empathy without endorsement. In an era of hot takes and hard lines, he’s arguing for the radical, unfashionable power of looking twice.