Creativity Quote by Saul Williams

There is a quiet bait-and-switch in Saul Williams admitting he was "always making up rhymes" but never expected poetry to "become my life". Rhyming reads like a childhood tic, a private game, something you do on the bus or in the margins of a notebook. Then comes the tonal pivot: not a hobby, not even a craft, but a life. The line compresses the distance between play and vocation, and it also hints at how little control artists actually have over the thing that eventually claims them.

Williams is a musician, but he’s also a spoken-word figure who came up in a moment when poetry was slipping out of the seminar room and back into public air: open mics, slam stages, politically charged performance, hip-hop’s linguistic arms race. In that context, "rhymes" aren’t a quaint prelude to "real" art; they’re the raw material of identity. The subtext is that poetry didn’t merely provide a career lane - it provided a survival strategy and a social role, a way to metabolize anger, desire, and politics into something shareable.

The phrasing also rejects the packaged myth of destiny. Williams doesn’t claim he was born chosen; he implies he stumbled into purpose by following the impulse to make language move. That humility is strategic: it democratizes the doorway. If the start is just "making up rhymes", then the boundary between everyday speech and art looks less like a gate and more like a dare.