Creativity Quote by Paul Simon

Harmony is easy in the cramped quarters of the early days; ego needs room to grow. Paul Simon’s line has the plainspoken sting of someone remembering how a partnership can be undone less by ideology than by scale. The setup is almost domestic: “many more points of agreement” implies shared taste, shared ambition, shared language. Then comes the turn - “but we did differ” - delivered without melodrama, as if the real drama isn’t the difference itself but what success does to it.

The key insight is in the architecture of the sentence: “the bigger we got” isn’t just fame as a number, it’s expansion of stakes. When a project is small, compromise feels like play; when it’s big, compromise feels like surrender. “More insistent” captures that creeping conversion of creative conviction into entitlement. Simon isn’t painting anyone as a villain. He’s describing a psychological upgrade that arrives with acclaim: you start believing your instincts aren’t just preferences, they’re the reason the whole machine works.

The gendered, era-specific “each one of us should have his way” quietly places this in a mid-century, male, competitive model of genius - two talents calibrated against each other, with little cultural vocabulary for shared authorship once the audience crowns you. In the Simon and Garfunkel context, it reads as an autopsy of a famous split where the tragedy wasn’t incompatibility; it was success hardening collaboration into a referendum on control.