Success Quote by Ken Hill

Hill’s line quietly demotes craft from a pedestal to a conduit. He’s not dismissing technique; he’s insisting that technique is only justified if it lands somewhere human. By pairing “author” with “musician,” he reaches for an art form people instinctively experience in the body: rhythm, breath, tempo, the involuntary swell when a melody turns. It’s a sly corrective to the literary world’s tendency to prize cleverness, novelty, or “important” themes as standalone virtues. Hill implies that if a page doesn’t move you, it’s virtuosity without music.

The phrase “prime goal” is doing heavy lifting. Not “a goal,” not “an outcome,” but the organizing purpose that should govern all other ambitions: beauty, experimentation, even political argument. And the deliberately roomy “in some way or another” widens the emotional palette beyond the sentimental. Connection can mean laughter, dread, discomfort, recognition, arousal, grief, outrage. A playwright especially knows that audiences don’t applaud stage directions; they respond to what registers in the room.

Context matters: Hill worked in theater, a medium with immediate feedback and little patience for purely cerebral performance. Onstage, emotion isn’t an abstract ideal; it’s measurable in silence, in fidgeting, in the timing of laughter. His subtext is almost professional advice: if you can’t build a felt bridge, you’re not communicating, you’re decorating. The ambition is democratic, too. Emotional connection doesn’t require elite literacy; it requires honesty, timing, and attention to the listener.