Creativity Quote by Peter Hook

There’s a stubborn, almost punk plainness to Peter Hook’s “I’m not ready to stop,” and that’s exactly why it lands. No grand mythology, no victory lap, no tidy retirement arc. Just the blunt insistence of someone who’s spent decades watching the culture treat musicians like disposable eras: you peak, you cash out, you become a nostalgia act. Hook refuses the script.

The phrasing matters. “Still feel as if” is modest, even slightly defensive, as if he knows the world expects him to be done and he’s preemptively swatting away the polite suggestion. “Things to do” is tantalizingly unspecific, which reads less like PR and more like a working musician’s mindset: there’s always another track, another tour, another argument with history to have. The real subtext isn’t ambition so much as unfinished business.

With Hook, that carries extra voltage because his career is inseparable from the afterlife of Joy Division and New Order: bands that never stop being re-litigated, whose catalog becomes both a gift and a trap. Saying he’s not ready to stop is also a claim of authorship. It pushes back against the idea that the past is a museum other people curate, or that legacy is something you’re granted once you’ve become safely inert.

It’s less “I need the spotlight” than “I’m still in the fight” - against time, against reduction, against being turned into a commemorative plaque while you’re still breathing.