Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

“I don’t like the idea of famous people” lands less like a complaint and more like a refusal to participate in a whole cultural operating system. Coming from Kristin Hersh - a musician whose work has often prized rawness over polish - the line isn’t a coy anti-celebrity pose. It’s an indictment of fame as a concept: a category that turns a living, changing person into a static product.

The phrasing matters. She’s not saying she dislikes celebrities; she dislikes the “idea” of them. That word choice shifts the target from individuals to the machinery that manufactures them: the press cycle that flattens complexity into a headline-ready persona, the audience’s hunger for access, the industry’s need for marketable symbols. “Famous people” aren’t just people with name recognition; they’re characters in a story everyone else feels entitled to co-write.

There’s also an ethical edge hiding inside the understatement. Hersh is pushing back on the way fame encourages dehumanization on both sides: fans treat the artist as a vessel for their own meaning, while the artist is pressured to perform a consistent self for consumption. The result is intimacy without consent, proximity without reciprocity.

In the context of alternative and indie cultures that historically defined themselves against mainstream spectacle, the quote reads like a defense of the private interior life that art comes from. It’s not anti-audience; it’s anti-architecture - a plea to let artists stay human-sized.