Creativity Quote by Art Garfunkel

Garfunkel is describing a craft ethic that sounds almost anti-myth: not inspiration as lightning bolt, but inspiration as editing. "Mix and match" frames songwriting and performance as modular - you try combinations, keep what sings, discard what doesn’t. Coming from a musician whose most famous work is inseparable from harmony, arrangement, and studio polish, the phrase lands as a quiet rebuke to the romantic idea that authenticity means leaving everything raw.

The tension in the quote sits in the phrase "hold your line". It’s both musical and interpersonal: keep your melodic line, keep your position, don’t get talked out of the thing you know is right. But Garfunkel immediately undercuts any macho auteur posturing. You "hold" it only when you "really feel" it, when it’s "wonderful" - an emotional threshold, not a power move. The insistence is earned, not automatic.

Then comes the most revealing subtext: "prove it to your partner". This is the Simon and Garfunkel story in miniature. Collaboration is a negotiation where conviction needs evidence. The studio becomes the courtroom. You don’t win by arguing; you win by committing the idea to tape and letting the playback deliver the verdict. "Letting it speak for itself" sounds humble, but it’s also tactical: record it, and the sound bypasses ego. In a band, and especially in a famously fraught duo, the tape is the neutral third party - the place where the song, not the personalities, gets the last word.