Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

Carly Simon frames creativity less like a faucet you turn on and more like a place you move through: a “village” with streets, seasons, and, crucially, vacancies. It’s a small, deceptively domestic metaphor that quietly rebukes the myth of the eternally “on” artist. A village implies community and history; songwriting isn’t just a private spark, it’s a lived environment built over time. When she says she’s “gone through” it, she’s admitting motion and change as the baseline, not the exception.

The most telling turn is the shift from agency to estrangement: “including one where it has been very quiet and abandoned me.” She doesn’t claim she abandoned the work; she lets the work abandon her. That reversal carries the emotional truth many artists hesitate to name: dry spells don’t feel like rest, they feel like being left. It also gently protects her from the cultural demand for constant output. If the muse can leave, then silence isn’t laziness or a fall from relevance; it’s part of the terrain.

Coming from Simon, whose catalog has been mined for confession and intimacy, this is also a boundary-setting move. Fans often treat a singer-songwriter’s life as an always-open source of material. By acknowledging “phases” and “a few years” of abandonment, she normalizes withdrawal and privacy, recasting absence as an artistic fact rather than a scandal. It’s an unusually honest way to talk about longevity: not as a straight line of productivity, but as a career built to survive quiet.