"How can you say when you're attracted to something? It's not easy to articulate my tastes"
About this Quote
Goldblum is doing what Goldblum does best: turning uncertainty into a kind of charisma. On the surface, he’s talking about attraction as a messy, hard-to-define sensation. Underneath, he’s pushing back against the modern demand for clean self-summaries: your type, your brand, your algorithm-ready preferences. The line frames desire not as a checklist but as a glitchy, intuitive signal, something you recognize in your body before you can translate it into language.
The phrasing matters. “How can you say” isn’t just a question; it’s a mild rebuke aimed at anyone insisting you should be able to explain yourself on command. Then he pivots from “when you’re attracted” to “my tastes,” slipping from a universal experience into personal territory. That shift is the tell: this isn’t a philosophy lecture, it’s a person defending his interior life. He’s implying that explanation can flatten the thing being explained, that the minute you pin attraction down, it stops being alive.
In cultural context, it’s also a sly critique of confession-as-content. Celebrities are endlessly asked to narrate their appetites - romantic, aesthetic, sexual - in ways that read as authentic but function as consumable trivia. Goldblum’s refusal is playful, not hostile: he offers vulnerability (“not easy”) while keeping the core private. The subtext is permission. If even a public figure can admit he doesn’t have a neat theory of his own desire, maybe you don’t need one either.
The phrasing matters. “How can you say” isn’t just a question; it’s a mild rebuke aimed at anyone insisting you should be able to explain yourself on command. Then he pivots from “when you’re attracted” to “my tastes,” slipping from a universal experience into personal territory. That shift is the tell: this isn’t a philosophy lecture, it’s a person defending his interior life. He’s implying that explanation can flatten the thing being explained, that the minute you pin attraction down, it stops being alive.
In cultural context, it’s also a sly critique of confession-as-content. Celebrities are endlessly asked to narrate their appetites - romantic, aesthetic, sexual - in ways that read as authentic but function as consumable trivia. Goldblum’s refusal is playful, not hostile: he offers vulnerability (“not easy”) while keeping the core private. The subtext is permission. If even a public figure can admit he doesn’t have a neat theory of his own desire, maybe you don’t need one either.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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