Creativity Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe’s line feels like a desert-blunt corrective to the myth that achievement is something bestowed by committees, husbands, or history. “Declare” is the operative verb: not “earn,” not “deserve,” not even “make.” It’s a word from law and borders and manifestos. In a cultural economy where artists (and especially women artists) are trained to wait for validation, declaring becomes a kind of aesthetic self-government.

The subtext is tougher than it looks. She isn’t peddling motivational-poster certainty so much as naming a recurring reality of creative life: the world often treats confidence as evidence. If you don’t name the work, define the stakes, and insist on the frame, someone else will. For O'Keeffe, that “someone else” was famously close at hand: Alfred Stieglitz, the critics who eroticized her flowers, the institutions that wanted to explain her paintings as symbols rather than decisions. Declaring an accomplishment is a refusal to be interpreted into submission.

There’s also an implied cost. A declaration invites pushback; it exposes you to charges of arrogance, delusion, or overreach. O'Keeffe’s career suggests she understood that the artist’s authority is not granted once, but repeatedly asserted through choices: where to live, what to paint, what to ignore, when to disappear. The sentence works because it collapses accomplishment into an act of speech - a reminder that recognition is partly a negotiation, and that the first, hardest audience is often your own hesitation.