Creativity Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

Jealousy is usually framed as romantic melodrama or petty insecurity; Hitchcock flips it into an artistic operating system. “I was always jealous of something getting more attention” doesn’t confess envy of a person so much as envy of a spotlight. The object is deliberately vague - “something” - which makes the feeling portable: a chart-topping band, a new trend, a louder personality at the bar, even your own earlier song that audiences won’t stop requesting. It’s the musician’s version of watching the room drift toward whatever’s brightest and realizing your work lives or dies on that drift.

The line works because it’s half-shrug, half-wound. “Always” suggests a lifelong condition, not a one-off lapse, and the simplicity reads like a backstage aside rather than a polished aphorism. That casualness is the mask; underneath is a tight portrait of attention as currency in modern culture, especially for artists who prize eccentricity while still needing an audience to meet them halfway.

In Hitchcock’s orbit - the post-psychedelic, cult-adjacent world where critical love doesn’t always translate to mass recognition - jealousy becomes less about wanting someone else to fail and more about wanting your own strange signal to cut through the noise. It’s an honest, slightly funny admission that even the most left-of-center creativity still craves the basic proof of being seen. The subtext: I’m not immune to the marketplace; I just negotiate with it differently.