Creativity Quote by Samuel Lover

Applause is the oldest con in the room: loud enough to feel like truth, fleeting enough to dodge accountability. Samuel Lover, an Irish songwriter, painter, and man-of-the-stage, offers advice that sounds genial but carries a seasoned performer’s edge. “Enjoy it” grants the very human need for recognition; art is made in public, and the public answers back. Then comes the pivot: “never quite believe it.” Not “ignore it,” not “despise it,” but keep it at arm’s length, as if applause were weather - real, affecting, and fundamentally indifferent.

The intent is practical self-defense. For an artist, praise is both payment and poison. Believe it too fully and you start composing for the clapping rather than the craft, mistaking volume for value. Disbelieve it entirely and you harden into performative contempt, another way of letting the crowd run your inner life. Lover’s phrasing splits the difference with surgical precision: enjoyment is permitted; dependence is not.

The subtext is that audiences applaud for reasons that have little to do with your deepest work: relief that the show is over, social signaling, the pleasure of being part of a wave, even politeness. In Lover’s 19th-century performance culture - where touring, patronage, and public taste could make or break a career overnight - applause was a currency that inflated easily. He’s teaching an artist to treat that currency like paper money: spendable, useful, but never mistaken for the thing itself.