Creativity Quote by Jerome Hines

In one plainspoken sentence, Jerome Hines gives away the unglamorous truth behind a glamorous instrument: a great voice is less a gift than a managed ecosystem. He starts with “motivation,” a word that sounds inspirational until he ties it to something ruthlessly practical: “keeping my voice.” Not finding it, not expressing it, not “unlocking” it. Keeping it. The verb choice frames the voice as perishable, something that can be lost through neglect, ego, or simple entropy.

Then he pivots to “human factors,” which quietly deflates the myth that singers are ruled by mood or muse. Hines is talking about the body and the person attached to it: sleep, stress, travel, appetite, patience, vanity, the temptation to push on a bad day because the ticket buyers are already seated. Calling them “human factors” is almost corporate in its coolness, as if the most volatile part of the operation is the singer’s ordinary humanity.

“Discipline” lands like a corrective. It’s not the romantic discipline of suffering for art; it’s the workmanlike discipline of routines, restraint, and saying no. Coming from an opera bass who built a long career in an era of punishing schedules and big houses, the line reads like backstage wisdom: technique matters, but technique isn’t self-executing. Motivation gets you to care; discipline keeps you employable. The subtext is bracing: your voice is your job, and your job doesn’t care what you feel today.