Creativity Quote by Alva Noto

Alva Noto’s line reads like a clean, minimalist beat: simple on the surface, quietly brutal underneath. The first clause flatters us with possibility - “all options are always open” - a familiar contemporary comfort, the myth of infinite choice. Then he snaps the door shut. Choice isn’t just agency; it’s subtraction. “Inevitably” does heavy lifting here, stripping away the self-help fantasy that we can optimize our way into having everything. You don’t curate a life without excluding other lives.

The phrasing is intentionally plain, almost schematic: A, B. That’s not laziness; it’s an artist’s way of making the point portable. Swap in careers, relationships, cities, aesthetics, even software tools - the underlying structure stays the same. In Noto’s world, where work often hinges on constraints (limited palettes, strict grids, controlled noise), the statement doubles as a creative ethic. Freedom isn’t the absence of limits; it’s what you do after you accept them.

The subtext pushes back against a culture trained to keep options “open” as a status symbol. Indecision can masquerade as sophistication, but it’s also risk-aversion: if you never pick B, you never have to mourn A. Noto puts mourning back into the equation. The clarity is the sting: every real commitment is a kind of loss, and every meaningful practice - artistic or otherwise - is built on that loss being chosen rather than suffered.