Quotes & Sayings About Celebrity Culture

Shouldn't we be presenting an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply mimicking it? What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement? — Philip Yancey

Once they began doing 'Celebrity Apprentice,' apparently the audience wasn't that keen on the ordinary apprentice. That is probably the best indictment with our fascination with celebrity in our culture, which drives me crazy. — David Cassidy

The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know? — Damon Albarn

Yet in the celebrity-obsessed culture, where everything of you is a shot on the red carpet, I don't want that to dominate my image. First and foremost, I am an actor. I want great roles. — Eva Mendes

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. — Frank Rich

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus - I paraphrase only slightly - 'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony. — Christopher Hitchens

The great thing about celebrity culture is that they can't seem to stop themselves from displaying their ridiculous behaviour. I feel it's my job as a serious investigative journalist to witness all kinds of behaviour and then report back to the audience through the prism of my own anger and bitterness. — Kathy Griffin

Perpetual celebrity - the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture - is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali. — Carrie Fisher

I did not become successful in my work through embracing or engaging in celebrity culture. I never signed away my privacy in exchange for success. — Steve Coogan

A lot of comic conventions go way beyond comic books and include other parts of pop culture, like celebrities and science fiction and movies and books. So I go to them either as a celebrity, or as a fan, because I'm a big sci-fi geek. — Jane Wiedlin

Unshackled by strict yet arbitrary, misguided norms, outcasts can be, look, act, and associate however they want. And in this ever conformist, cookie-cutter, magazine-celebrity-worshipping, creativity-stifling society, the innovation, courage, and differences of the cafeteria fringe are vital to America's culture and progress. Which is why we must celebrate them. — Alexandra Robbins

Agent Julianne was always looking for ways to spin things. She would have been better off owning a laundromat. — Jonas Eriksson

Why are we so obsessed with celebrity culture? We have front-page news about divorces instead of front-page news about global warming, about women being abused, about children being abused. We're going on a downward spiral. — Heather Mills

Celebrity culture is something that pains me. — Susie Orbach

It's not great when your husband thinks the only guy who can talk to you, is some other guy. — Jonas Eriksson

Celebrity is more than a culture today; it is an industry, complete with fame factories. — Mal Fletcher

The culture of celebrity has become insane. It's all based on fantasy, and I find it creepy and disturbing. — Sophia Myles

I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture. — Marlon Brando

I worry about the culture of celebrity in this country. Personality over performance. Fashion before form. For the popular culture it makes interesting fare, but I think in the long-term the negative consequences are enormous. — B.R. Snow

I'm not really part of that 'L.A. thing' or that celebrity culture. I'm more like someone who observes it, and I can't ever imagine being like that. — Marina And The Diamonds

We're in a celebrity culture, and when I turn on the news today I hear about Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters and 'Dancing with the Stars,' one thing after another, Kate Gosselin's new body. — Philip Yancey

I don't like the celebrity gossip culture, and I certainly don't want to contribute to it. I don't care about the Kardashians, or any of them. — Merrill Markoe

I think celebrity culture and sexuality in pop music is really important, but I want there to be an alternative for people. — Marina And The Diamonds

When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture. — George Lois

I feel like there's something interesting to learn from anyone's story, no matter their place in society. I think we've gotten really far away from that - we're in such a celebrity-obsessed culture. — Liz Goldwyn

I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life ... I know the yearning to believe that what I'm doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate. — Brene Brown

Sports biography at its best. Rich in period detail, anecdote, and fresh perspective, Strong Boy paints both the good and the bad sides of success, as America's growing celebrity culture turned a simple Irish American gladiator into a national, in fact international hero. A very human story with profound parallels for our sports-obsessed culture today! — Nigel Hamilton

Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence. — David Halberstam

Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world's resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love? And I think that's the visionary challenge for feminism and all other progressive movements for social change. — Bell Hooks

But I want you to know that you're a beautiful girl, far more beautiful than I ever was at your age, and that starving yourself to compete with all of those skinny celebrities who spend half their lives checking in and out of rehab is not only a completely unreasonable and unattainable goal, but will only end up making you sick. — Alyson Noel

Our culture has become so obsessed with celebrity that it's easy to confuse fame with success. They are not the same thing. — Daniel Rodriguez

There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. — David Rakoff

You can assess a culture to a degree by the way they receive movies and how they receive a given celebrity. — Kristen Stewart

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There's a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that's no longer united. We are muddled. — Jeremy Clarkson

Everything is happening faster on the Internet, so advertisers have to be able to respond quickly. If there is a pop-culture topic, a celebrity, event, some amazing viral video, a news story - how do advertisers get close to that so they can take advantage of traffic jumps? — Jason Hirschhorn

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture. — Carl Hiaasen

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Celebrity culture, it's everywhere, isn't it? It's reality TV, Big Brother. I didn't become a footballer to be famous, I became a footballer to be successful. I didn't want to be famous. Now people want to be famous. Why? Why would you want people following you about all day? — Ryan Giggs

Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves. — Lady Gaga

We don't just live in a celebrity take-down culture; we live in a take-down culture. People will find anything about you and twist it to where it's weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to live your life not only in spite of people who don't understand you - you have to have more fun than they do. — Taylor Swift

If you look at the footballers, you look at our celebrity culture, we seem to be saying, 'This is the way you want to be'. We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people. — Iain Duncan Smith

Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. 'Look at me', it says, 'I've worked it all out'. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish. — Guy Mankowski

In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles. — Boris Pasternak

Fate. Now that's a loaded word. Like "yoga" or "karma", it's one of those words that slipped out of its native culture and ended up a celebrity with an extreme makeover. — Debra Ollivier

Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don't want it to be. — Paloma Faith

Our culture is so celebrity-obsessed that for individuals to show they matter, they need to display their intimacy to fame. — Susan Isaacs

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions? — Mary Wollstonecraft

I'm very intrigued that in this culture of reality television and celebrity - which is an enormous industry and generates billions and billions of dollars - we're so resourceful. — Annie Lennox

I'm a pop culture junkie. I'm a People magazine reader, an US Weekly subscriber; all of those celebrity magazines get my dollar. — Laurie Foos

Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything. — Chris Martin

I don't find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life - we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That's how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too. — John Green

Thank fuck the camera loved him more than he loved himself.
He could recline on silk sheets for cologne or seethe in a sportscar. His life became the silk sheet he had once reclined upon: smooth, compliant and without substance. In pursuit of that something, he enterprised. His upbringing on Lake Como receded as he found himself sipping sangria on a Monte Carlo balcony, basking on his cruiser in Cannes or cheering Chelsea within a glass suite above the stands. Whether he felt dead inside wasn't up for discussion. — Charles J. Harwood

Now you look like someone who is trying not to be someone, as opposed to nobody not managing to be anybody. — Robert Bryndza

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn't pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts. — Stephen Fry

Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path. — Reed Albergotti

I've always wanted to be a journalist, but what am I going to do? Write articles about which movie star had the fat sucked from her ass and injected into her face? Which professional athlete just confessed to shooting steroids? The last celebrity baby names?" Cara lowered both brows in frustration. "Who cares? — Melissa Landers

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness. — Cornel West

There are many cultural scenes in Lahore, just as there are in London. And there is a celebrity culture here, just as there is in London. But in Lahore, the celebrity scene doesn't drown out the rest quite so much. — Mohsin Hamid

I think our culture has gotten so skewed. People assume that because you're an actor you want to write a book to exploit your celebrity, but my celebrity is only a byproduct of me making movies. I have no intention of being a celebrity. — Jonah Hill

There are only two things you'll ever need to know about me, Farin - and you should know them well. I'm very smart, and I'm very rich. — Heather O'Brien

Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well. — Christopher Hitchens

This obsession with celebrity culture is really unhealthy. I don't want to live my life like that, and I don't want to be a typical pop star. — Marina And The Diamonds

We see everything. We see what celebrities buy at the supermarket. It's ridiculous. It's that visibility. I'm confused by this whole celebrity-obsessed culture. — Eva Mendes

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. — Chris Hedges

Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it. — Alice Oswald

The whole celebrity culture thing - I'm fascinated by, and repelled by, and yet I end up knowing about it. — Anderson Cooper

Sorry we're late. Liam had to make sure his hair fell just right. — Kristina Adams

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. — Stephen Fry

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs. — Russell Banks

I think Hollywood has always, you know, there's always been glamour associated to it. And especially in the last ten years there has been a growing sort of obsession with celebrity life and celebrity culture. — Debra Messing

A friend of mine, Warren Lemming, has this theory: if you're famous, it's as if you've got a golden monkey on your shoulder. When people come up to talk to you, they just see the monkey. — Heathcote Williams

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. — Thomas McGuane

I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There's very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That's not true in other countries so much. — Philip Yancey

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. — Stephen King

We need to teach our kids, because there is such a celebrity culture at the moment, that however rich you are, however famous you are, however glamorous you are, everyone has to live by the same rules. — Nick Clegg

The celebrity culture demands a camera-ready-at-all-times look or else the photo is circulated in a demeaning headline. — Zoe Cassavetes

My first book, 'Fast Forward', was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the U.K. is because it's everything the British love to hate about the Americans. — Lauren Greenfield

Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of "likes." People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people's highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior. — David Brooks

It's wonderful to find cultures that are historically still intact, as opposed to a lot of Western cultures which seem to me to be slowly dying, stuck in celebrity illness or stupidity. — Jamie Hewlett

Anonymity beats fame. One cannot undo fame. — Anonymous

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week. — Philip K. Dick

Look, we live in a celebrity culture and sometimes you get caught in the wave and the buzz and a lot of it's flattering but, you know, one of the things that I try to remind people of is, is that I was in politics as a state senator operating in obscurity for many years. Before that I was a community organizer working in low income communities in Chicago and nobody knew my name then. And so, having involved myself in public service for a pretty long time without getting too much attention, hopefully I can keep some of the attention that I'm getting now in perspective. — Barack Obama

These ancient laws also reflected a widespread suspicion that women accusing men of rape were lying--a belief system that is still operative today. Almost every time a star athlete or celebrity is accused of rape, for example, there's an inference that the charge is false, brought by a scorned, or vindictive, or drunk, or willing woman against an innocent man. — Joanna Connors

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty. — Philip Yancey