Art & Creativity Quote by Judy Collins

Collins frames discipline as a kind of gentle coercion: not inspiration descending like a muse, but a bargain you strike with yourself when the stakes are real and the calendar is unforgiving. The phrasing is telling. “If I give myself a chore” deliberately demystifies songwriting. A “chore” is domestic, unglamorous, repeatable. It’s the opposite of the romantic myth that great songs arrive only when you’re emotionally struck by lightning. Collins, a musician whose career spans folk’s confessional peak and decades of touring reality, is quietly puncturing that myth without sounding dour.

The specific intent is pragmatic: she’s describing a method that produces work on demand. But the subtext is more bracing. “Good, bad or indifferent” is permission and provocation at once. She’s granting herself the right to write mediocre songs, which is also a way of ensuring she writes anything at all. Quantity becomes the pathway to quality; the bad songs aren’t failures, they’re the compost.

Context matters: writing “the songs for Shameless” (the musical project, not the TV show) implies a defined commission, a narrative framework, and deadlines. In that setting, waiting for the “right” feeling becomes self-sabotage. The 90-day rule is a private contract that turns creativity into routine and routine into momentum. Collins isn’t selling hustle culture; she’s describing artistic longevity: when you’ve been at it long enough, professionalism isn’t a compromise of authenticity, it’s how you protect it.