Creativity Quote by Lee Hazlewood

Hazlewood’s charm here is how he smuggles a whole aesthetic manifesto into a complaint about downtime. He’s talking like a working musician who’s wandered onto a set and immediately clocked the indignity: you’re not making anything most of the day, you’re loitering in someone else’s schedule. That “at least if it’s in films anyway” is doing quiet work - he’s not condemning cinema, he’s noting its reality as labor: glamour on screen, boredom off it.

Then he pivots with a craftsman’s backhanded compliment. Television is “a lot faster,” he admits, which sounds like praise until the next clause slides in: “but the product...” The pause is the punchline. Hazlewood treats speed as a trade-off, not a virtue. Faster means cheaper time, thinner attention, fewer chances to refine the thing. It’s an artist’s suspicion of assembly-line culture, delivered in plain talk.

Context matters: Hazlewood came up in an era when film still carried prestige and permanence, while TV was the noisy, deadline-driven roommate. His subtext isn’t nostalgia for celluloid; it’s a defense of slowness as the hidden ingredient of quality. He’s also lightly roasting the entertainment industry’s obsession with efficiency - a mindset that makes the process miserable and then acts surprised when the result feels disposable.

Underneath the gripe is a value system: if waiting is the price of making something that lasts, Hazlewood will pay it, even while rolling his eyes the whole time.