Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Keating

A wry shrug runs through the line, the kind of self-effacing humor artists use to keep grandiosity at bay. Charles Keating, the acclaimed actor and stage veteran, treats the word write like a pedestal he has not earned, swapping it for scribble, a term that suggests play, spontaneity, and the permission to fail. By framing his efforts as attempts, he names the creative process as provisional, more about groping toward expression than arriving at a polished outcome. The refusal of publication as a goal does not read as bitterness, but as a principled modesty, even a safeguard: once work is aimed at being published, expectations harden, ego intrudes, and the freedom to experiment can wither.

For an actor steeped in language but known for giving life to other peoples words, the line also honors the hierarchy of crafts. Playwrights and poets labor to make text endure; actors animate that text in time. To claim the title of writer would be, for Keating, a kind of trespass unless the work rises to the threshold he reveres. The stance pays tribute to writers by reserving their mantle while still acknowledging a private, necessary habit of making marks, jotting images, catching a voice before it evaporates.

There is also a gentle exposure of vulnerability. Scribbling hints at notebooks, margins, the scraps that accumulate in dressing rooms and quiet hours. Refusing publication keeps those fragments intimate, a shelter from the public verdict that can distort the impulse that produced them. Yet the sentence is not an apology. It quietly insists that creative life is not validated only by public markers. The scribble can be honest, playful, and nourishing without the imprimatur of print. In that balance of humility and resolve, Keating frames art as a practice first, a public artifact only if it must be, and a private conversation with language that is worthwhile even when no one else reads it.