Creativity Quote by Joan Armatrading

Armatrading’s sentence is a polite compliment that carries the sharper edge of someone who’s spent decades in rooms where politeness is currency. The opening "Yes, but" signals she’s correcting the record: maybe the conversation was drifting toward gossip, ego, or interpersonal friction, and she’s steering it back to the only metric she’s willing to elevate - musicianship. It’s a classic veteran move: refuse the tabloid frame, return to the work.

The repetition - "very, very talented" - reads less like starry-eyed praise than like insistence. She’s not dazzled; she’s testifying. Coming from an artist known for precision and emotional restraint, doubling the adverb feels like a deliberate stamp of credibility. It’s also strategic. In an industry that loves to reduce women artists to temperament, collaborations, or "difficult" narratives, she makes a clean, defensible claim: whatever else you’ve heard, the people I chose to work with could play.

Then there’s the parenthetical clause: "and I don't think there is any exception". That’s where the subtext lives. It’s a preemptive shut door on the interviewer’s likely follow-up: Surely there was one dud, one diva, one disaster? Armatrading offers no crack for that story to enter. Instead, she frames her career as a series of intentional alignments with excellence, implying her own authority as curator and standard-setter.

The intent isn’t just generosity; it’s values. Talent is the filter. Everything else - drama, mythology, hierarchy - is background noise.