Creativity Quote by Richard D. James

There’s a deliberate mismatch in Richard D. James’s self-portrait: “really good hacker” lands as competence, control, even a kind of cold virtuosity; “not a sensible person” immediately yanks the floor out from under it. The line works because it refuses the clean fantasy of the tech genius as rational, optimized, and quietly superior. James claims the skill that modern culture fetishizes, then admits he’s not built for the tidy life that supposedly comes with it.

Coming from a musician known for engineering sound into something both precise and feral, the “hacker” label reads less like résumé bragging and more like worldview. Hacking is curiosity with a blade: taking systems apart, rerouting them, enjoying the loophole. In electronic music, that ethos is basically the job description - coaxing emotion out of circuitry, turning glitches into hooks, making machines confess. By pairing that with “not sensible,” James frames creativity as an operating system that doesn’t prioritize stability. He’s not apologizing; he’s explaining why the output has teeth.

The subtext also needles the audience’s desire to domesticate artists and technologists alike. We want brilliance that’s legible: a quirky savant who still shows up on time and answers emails. James offers a different bargain: you can have the results, but don’t demand normalcy as the price of admission. It’s a compact manifesto for outsider craft - mastery without respectability, skill without self-management, and a reminder that the most interesting systems are the ones someone unsensible is willing to break.