Creativity Quote by Martin Gore

Martin Gore’s line plays like a deadpan corrective to a brand he accidentally helped manufacture. As Depeche Mode’s chief songwriter, he’s spent decades vending exquisite gloom: longing, shame, desire, apocalypse, all pressed into synth-pop that feels like cathedral music for the club. So when he says people are “surprised” he’s “not always angst-ridden,” he’s really talking about the weird contract between artist and audience: we treat the work as a diagnostic report, then act betrayed when the patient stands up and cracks a joke.

The intent is modest but pointed. Gore isn’t denying the darkness; he’s refusing to be reduced to it. “Not always” is the key phrase - an adult’s admission that emotion is a range, not a costume. The subtext is a gentle eye-roll at the expectation that serious art must come from a perpetually damaged person. Fans, journalists, and even the marketing machine want the tortured genius because it makes the songs feel more “true.” Gore reminds you that craft exists. You can write despair the way a screenwriter writes a villain: convincingly, repeatedly, and without living there 24/7.

Context matters, too: post-punk and industrial-adjacent scenes often rewarded stoicism and gloom as authenticity. Depeche Mode’s imagery and themes amplified that aura, turning Gore into a proxy for a whole aesthetic of elegant misery. His quote punctures the myth without insulting the audience, a quick humanizing aside that protects the mystery while insisting on personhood.