Parenting & Family Quote by Linda Blair

Blair frames childlessness not as absence, but as a kind of moral trade: she’s opting out of one socially celebrated responsibility so she can lean harder into another. The bluntness of "I would be very selfish" is doing double duty. On the surface, it echoes the familiar line that people without kids are the selfish ones. Underneath, she flips it: for her, the selfish move would be having children and then resenting the way caregiving narrows a life. It’s an unglamorous admission, and that’s why it lands. She’s refusing the Hallmark version of motherhood where sacrifice arrives pre-packaged with gratitude.

The second half pivots from confession to justification, but it’s not a sterile careerist pitch. "Freer to travel" and "talk about things I feel are important" reads like a mission statement for public-facing work: activism, advocacy, whatever cause she’s tied her name to. Coming from an actress whose fame was forged young and famously intense, the subtext is about agency. Blair’s life was already partly claimed by public appetite; this is her insisting on choosing what claims her now.

Culturally, the quote sits in the crossfire of two modern expectations: that women should be endlessly available to family, and that public women must also be relentlessly purposeful. Blair splits the difference by naming the cost of both, then choosing the one that lets her move. It’s less a rejection of kids than a refusal to perform the right kind of womanhood on cue.