Creativity Quote by Ethel Merman

The line lands because it refuses the one thing show business is always selling: a roadmap. Ethel Merman, a woman whose voice could pin a balcony to the back wall, plays dumb with surgical timing. “When I’m asked” sets up a familiar ritual - the public’s hunger for a formula - and then she punctures it with “I haven’t the foggiest,” a phrase that sounds chatty and modest while quietly telling the truth: there is no transferable secret.

The intent isn’t self-deprecation so much as self-defense. Advice culture turns artists into vending machines: insert a question, receive a lesson. Merman sidesteps that extraction. She also protects the mystique of performance by admitting that success in entertainment is a messy collision of talent, timing, taste, and luck, plus a tolerance for rejection that doesn’t photograph well.

Context matters. Merman came up in an era of Broadway star-making that was both brutal and rigid: producers, critics, unions, shifting public appetites, and the constant threat of being replaced by the next voice. For a woman in the early-to-mid 20th century, “success” also meant navigating a gendered double bind - be big, but not “too much”; be confident, but not difficult. Her refusal to teach success is a sly way of refusing the moral accounting that often trails women who win.

The wit is that it’s honest without being earnest. She doesn’t romanticize the grind or pretend she “manifested” it. She just shrugs, and the shrug feels like authority.