Creativity Quote by Cynthia Weil

Songwriting isn’t a steady glow, Cynthia Weil reminds us; it’s weather. That first clause, “We all have fertile creative periods,” borrows the language of biology and agriculture, turning inspiration into something seasonal and embodied, not mystical. Fertility arrives, it ripens, it passes. In a culture that sells creativity as a permanent personality trait - the “genius” brand, the always-on artist - Weil insists it’s more like a tide. You don’t control it; you learn to work with it.

Then she lands the knife: “times when we can’t figure out how we ever did it.” The line isn’t self-pity so much as professional realism. It captures the peculiar amnesia of craft: you look back at your own best work the way you look at a magic trick after you’ve forgotten the method. Subtext: even the people who made the hits don’t fully understand the machinery that produced them. That’s not false modesty; it’s a warning against treating past success as a repeatable formula.

Weil’s context matters here. As one half of a powerhouse Brill Building partnership, she worked in an industrial setting that demanded constant output, collaboration, and deadlines - the opposite of romantic solitude. Her point isn’t that the muse is fickle; it’s that a career gets built by surviving the dry spells without letting them rewrite your identity. The quote offers a permission slip and a pep talk at once: the block isn’t proof you’re done. It’s part of the job.