Daily Inspiration Quote by Persis Khambatta

Khambatta is puncturing the romantic myth that performers run on pure confidence. She frames “creative people” as walking paradoxes: hungry for attention, terrified of what that attention actually means. The sharpness is in the distinction between being liked and being “in awe.” Liked is intimate, conditional, and fragile. Awe is distance, power, even a kind of misrecognition. If you can’t tell which one you’re getting, every laugh, pause, or compliment becomes a Rorschach test. That’s the insecurity she’s naming: not self-hatred, but uncertainty about the audience’s angle of regard.

The subtext is practical and a little ruthless. Insecurity “always comes out,” she says, as if it’s a leak you don’t fully control. Instead of treating that leak as failure, she treats it as usable fuel. Acting thrives on micro-tensions: the fear of rejection, the need to be believed, the ache to be chosen. A performer who’s too secure can read as sealed-off, uninterruptible. Insecurity keeps the instrument sensitive; it forces listening, adjustment, heightened presence.

There’s also a quiet self-portrait here. Khambatta’s career was built on being visually iconic and publicly interpreted (including roles that made her image do as much work as her dialogue). Her line suggests what it costs to become a surface people project onto: you never fully know whether you’re being seen, adored, or merely admired from a safe distance. That ambiguity, she argues, can sharpen the craft. It can also eat you alive.