Creativity Quote by Patti LaBelle

A diva admitting shyness is a small act of sabotage against the mythology we attach to fame. Patti LaBelle is supposed to be volume incarnate: the gowns, the runs, the stage-commanding certainty. "I was very shy. I'm still shy" punctures that cartoon in ten plain words, and that plainness is the point. No inspirational arc, no neat transformation story for fans to consume. Just continuity.

The intent feels almost corrective. In pop culture, confidence is treated like the admission ticket to greatness; shyness gets framed as a flaw to conquer before you earn the spotlight. LaBelle refuses the makeover narrative. By keeping the sentence in the present tense, she suggests performance isn’t the absence of fear or self-consciousness, it’s what you do alongside it. That lands harder coming from a singer whose voice has often been read as pure bravado. She’s quietly telling you the sound can be big even when the person is guarded.

There’s also an old-school Black female performer subtext here: the demand to be "on" for audiences, media, rooms full of executives, while your private self stays protected. Shyness becomes less a weakness than a boundary. The repetition of "shy" makes it almost rhythmic, like a refrain, a reminder that public power can coexist with private reserve. It’s a humanizing line, but it’s also a control move: she decides how the legend gets edited.